The distributed software concept of remoted processes, their application and implementation

The notion of remoted processes is a software concept for distributed systems, such as AT&T's 5ESS™ switching system. When a process is remoted, some of its programs are placed and run in a processor other than the one that first created it. Remoted processes are supported by a remoting subsystem. It permits the programmer to separate the program space of a remoted process and put parts of it into different processors without affecting the design of that process or of other processes that interface with it. This allows flexible placement of programs for the switch's call-processing features into different control processors. Without causing programming changes, these programs can be shifted to other processors according to expected feature usage and when the real-time and address-space capacity of the processor technology changes in specific generics. This paper describes the implementation of the essential features of the 5ESS switch remoting subsystem, including the techniques used for software auditing and exception handling.