Directly and Indirectly Synchronous Communication Mechanisms for Client-Server Systems Using Event-Based Asynchronous Communication Framework

Mingyu Lim

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2924497

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a synchronous communication mechanism that can be used with asynchronous communication in an event-based communication framework (CM). The proposed synchronous communication mechanism supports directly synchronous communication between client and server, indirectly synchronous communication between two clients through server mediation, and indirectly one-to-many synchronous communication with multiple clients. In order to support synchronous communication, the CM uses the synchronization mechanism between the main thread and the processing thread while maintaining the multi-thread structure. The application can utilize both the asynchronous and the synchronous communication service of the CM together according to its requirements. For performance analysis, we compared the CM synchronous and asynchronous communication methods with qualitative and quantitative experiments, respectively. Through qualitative analysis, developing applications using synchronous services can more intuitively design application logic than asynchronous services. From the quantitative experiment, we also verified that the response delay time in the synchronous method is shorter than that in the asynchronous method although the difference in the response delay is not large.

Highlights

Most distributed system applications, such as online games, social networking services, cloud services, and Internet of Things (IoT), communicate with each other using a client-server or peer-topeer model of communication structure
We propose a significantly extended version of communication framework (CM) that supports both synchronous and asynchronous communication methods [17]
We introduce the communication service provided by CM to application and eventbased asynchronous communication structure using multiple threads

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Most distributed system applications, such as online games, social networking services, cloud services, and IoT, communicate with each other using a client-server or peer-topeer model of communication structure. A. SYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION WITH NON-BLOCKING SOCKET CHANNEL In the existing CM service, since the main thread and the processing thread are separated, the client asynchronously receives the response to a request. (9) The main thread wakes up from the waiting state, checks the response event registered in the event synchronization object, and returns the service result value to the application. A server receiving a request does not have to wait for a specific thread to process the request from the client, but performs its tasks in the same manner as the conventional asynchronous communication method. The client main thread requests the service, and it waits until the response event from the server is received.

PERFORMANCE EVALUATIONS

RELATED WORK

CONCLUSIONS