Multiple transport protocols in an adaptive RPC-based framework

Abstract

The growing demand for distributed systems running in many environments and built atop heterogeneous transport protocols is apparent. However, existing middleware solutions commonly are built atop a unique protocol like TCP. This paper extends an existing framework for building middleware systems by adding several communications protocols. The proposed extensions allow developers to implement a middleware using distinct communication protocols (e.g., UDP, HTTP) or even replace them at runtime. An experimental evaluation was conducted (1) to show the impact of the new extensions on the application's performance and (2) to compare the performance of the proposed extensions with existing commercial middleware systems.