A lightweight middleware architecture and evaluation of middleware performance
Rajini I. Balay, Mladen Alan Vouk, Harry G. Perros · 1998
An important part of distributed applications is the communications middleware, which provides an interface between an application and the resources that it needs. General purpose middleware tends to provide functionalities that attempt to satisfy most of its users, due to which it is often bulky. This has prompted definition of the lightweight middleware concept. A middleware implementation can be lightweight in two respects: (1) a simple API, and (2) low performance overhead. This work explores this concept through implementation of the Lightweight Software Bus (LSB). LSB allows synchronous and asynchronous communication between processes. It supports message, direct channel and socket interfaces, and allows integration of GUI-based processes. LSB performance is comparable to that of low-level BSD communication mechanisms. The overhead that middleware imposes on application messages determines its performance. This thesis presents some techniques to estimate middleware overhead and discusses factors that affect its performance. Specifically, 1. A simulation model was used to study LSB under di erent conditions of traffic intensity, traffic burstiness and numbers of clients in the system. LSB represents a system