Consistent object replication in the Eternal system
L.E. Moser, Peter Michael Melliar-Smith, Priya Lakshmi Narasimhan · Theory and Practice of Object Systems · 1998
The Eternal system replicates CORBA objects to provide fault tolerance, high availability, and evolution of live objects. By exploiting the IIOP interface, Eternal renders the replication transparent to the application objects, and also to the ORB and thus works with standard commercial CORBA ORBs. To maintain replica consistency, Eternal uses operations communicated in totally ordered multicast messages, detection of duplicate invocations and duplicate responses, transfer of state between the object replicas, consistent scheduling of concurrent operations, and fulfillment operations for restoring a consistent state after network partitioning and remerging. The difficult issues of replication, consistency, fault detection, and recovery are handled by Eternal and are hidden from the application programmer. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.