Building a Reliable Message Delivery System Using the CORBA Event Service

Abstract

In this paper we study the suitability of the CORBA Event Service as a reliable message delivery mechanism. We first show that products built to the CORBA Event Service specification will not guarantee against loss of messages or guarantee order. This is not surprising, as the CORBA Event Service specification does not deal with Quality of Service (QoS) and monitoring issues. The CORBA Notification Service, although it provides much of the QoS features, may not be an option. Therefore, we examine application-level reliability schemes to build a reliable communication means over the existing CORBA Event Service. Our end-to-end reliability schemes are applicable to management applications where state resynchronization is possible and sufficient. The reliability schemes proposed provide resilience in the face of failures of the supplier, consumer, and the Event Service processes.