Developing a Consistent Domain-Oriented Distributed Object Service

This paper presents a new algorithm for a reconfigurable distributed domain-oriented atomic object service, called DO-RAMBO, which stands for Domain-Oriented Reconfigurable Atomic Memory for Basic Objects. This service is suitable for inclusion as a middleware system service for distributed applications requiring atomic read/write data. The implementation substantially extends and refines the abstract RAMBO algorithm of Lynch and Shvartsman that supports individual atomic objects. In this paper, domains are introduced to allow the users to group related atomic objects. The new implementation manages configurations on the basis of domains, significantly improving the utility and the performance of the resulting service. DO-RAMBO guarantees consistency under asynchrony, message loss, node crashes, new node arrivals, and node departures. We present the formal algorithm development for DO-RAMBO and give analytical and empirical results that illustrate the benefit of the new approach.