Native ATM support for CORBA platforms

The CORBA standard as published by the OMG (object management group) defines among other things the structure of a middleware platform called an object request broker (ORB) in order to achieve interoperability of applications in distributed and heterogeneous environments. The standard does not prescribe a specific technology for building this middleware platform. In this paper we show how to integrate ATM technology into a CORBA compliant implementation. Making use of the advantages offered by ATM requires the modification of the ORB API. A prototype is based on the freely available CORBA implementation called MICO. We show how to make use of MICO's micro-kernel architecture in order to achieve a seamless integration of a new transport layer.