Implementing Network Partition-Aware Fault-Tolerant CORBA Systems

The current standard for fault-tolerance in the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) does not support network partitioning. However, distributed systems, and those deployed on wide area networks in particular, are susceptible to network partitions. The contribution of this paper is the description of the design and implementation of a CORBA fault-tolerance add-on for partitionable environments. Our solution can be applied to an off-the-shelf Object Request Broker, without having access to the ORB's source code and with minimal changes to existing CORBA applications. The system distinguishes itself from existing solutions in the way different replication and reconciliation strategies can be implemented easily. Furthermore, we provide a novel replication and reconciliation protocol that increases the availability of systems, by allowing operations in all partitions to continue