Dependability of CORBA systems: service characterization by fault injection

The dependability of CORBA systems is a crucial issue for the development of today's distributed platforms and applications. This paper analyzes various techniques that can be applied to the dependability evaluation of CORBA systems. Due to the complexity of a middleware platform like CORBA and its various types of software components, experiments using several fault injection techniques are required to obtain comprehensive dependability benchmarks. To illustrate one of these techniques, we have applied fault injection at the communication level, targeting requests to major CORBA services, such as naming and events. Experiments have been carried out on a number of off-the-shelf implementations of CORBA. We present and discuss some of the results that we have obtained. They provide objective insights into the system's behaviour in the presence of faults, and are significant inputs for the selection of a candidate for a given application domain.