A Survey of Fault Tolerant CORBA Systems

Abstract

CORBA is an OMG standard for distributed object computing; but despite being a standard and wide scale acceptance in the industry it lacks the ability to meet high demands of quality of service (QoS) required for building a reliable fault tolerant distributed system. To tackle these issues, in 2001, OMG incorporated fault tolerance mechanisms, QoS policies and services in its standard interfaces as mentioned in its Fault Tolerant CORBA (FT-CORBA) specification. FT-CORBA Architecture used the notion of object replication to provide reliable and fault tolerant services. In this paper, we surveyed the different approaches for building FT-CORBA based distributed systems with their merits and limitations. We gave an overview of FT-CORBA specification; its requirements and limitations, and FT-CORBA Architecture. We have also revised the existing categorization of FT-CORBA systems by incorporating a fourth approach, i.e., Reflective Approach, in the categorization taxonomy. A comparison between different types of replication and FT-CORBA based systems is conducted to achieve quick insight on their features.