On framing object relationships to improve QoS in distributed systems

There has been a great deal of confusion about building referential, containment and other relationships into object-oriented distributed systems built according to the object invocation model. While real-time object request brokers (ORBs) have come into the marketplace, lagging behind is the craft of building distributed systems that can have predictable behavior while allowing large-scale object-to-object navigation. This paper advocates an architectural framework to be used in building large-scale relationship-rich distributed systems. The application of this architectural framework would be in systems where a large number of networked pieces of equipment are built into relational hierarchies.