A Fault-Tolerant Real-Time CORBA Naming Service

Many mission critical applications are required to meet high degrees of depend- ability and predictability requirements simultaneously. It is still not possible to use CORBA to manage applications’ FT and RT properties in unison due to con- tradicting strategies in the support mechanisms. The emerging OMG’s Lightweight Fault-Tolerance for Distributed Real-Time Systems specification aims to address this challenge by defining standard interactions between CORBA and external FT mech- anisms while maintaining the portability of applications based on CORBA middle- ware. This project will investigate key technical issues and design a prototype Lightweight Fault Tolerance CORBA based on the emerging specification. Before developing a fault-tolerant, real-time CORBA Naming Service, we will also explore various mecha- nisms for implementing predictable FT mechanisms and evaluate strategies for spec- ifying applications’ FT and RT requirements. Finally, different FT/RT applications requires different degrees of real-time and fault-tolerance support. We will develop a test suite for benchmarking applications with FT/RT constraints to help assess different FT mechanisms and systems.