Design and implementation of a Java RMI caching mechanism on active networks

Distributed object technology has the benefits to implement large-scale distributed applications, but it suffers from expensive communication overhead. We propose a novel caching mechanism called ActiveRMI (Active Remote Method Invocation) to improve RMI performance by employing active networks infrastructure with a code caching scheme. Therefore, RMI services can be dynamically deployed over network and built up at intermediate active routers. ActiveRMI relieves the server bottleneck, reduceds the amount of network traffic, and shortens the user response time. A prototype has been implemented. Although the experimental environment is in a small-scale active network, the preliminary experimental results are positive.