A real-time, fault tolerant CORBA implementation: a case study

The Object Management Group's (OMG's) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard has attracted a great deal of attention in the distributed object oriented systems community because of its capability to greatly simplify the creation of vendor-independent, heterogeneous application systems. However, the current CORBA standard, version 2.3, provides neither interfaces to manage resources for real time response, nor interfaces to manage the redundant object entities required for a highly reliable, fault tolerant application. The paper describes the design and implementation of an Object Request Broker (ORB), compliant with the OMG standard, that includes extensions to support both real time response and entity redundancy capabilities in the context of the CORBA standard. This implementation demonstrates an important extension of the ORB paradigm into many real time, fault tolerant application domains.