An asynchronous remote procedure call system for heterogeneous programming

The authors introduce the reliable asynchronous remote procedure call (RARPC) which is an efficient communication control mechanism to support a heterogeneous distributed programming environment. The mechanism is based on an asynchronous control algorithm which is developed for managing multi-threaded asynchronous calls in the client/server model of the heterogeneous distributed environment. A RARPC communication exchange protocol is built on IP/UDP which is supported in the 4.3 BSD UNIX operating system. The RARPC prototype system is implemented among several Sun workstations and a VAX 11/780. The authors have measured the performance of the RARPC system and compared it to the Sun's NFS/RPC. The results show that in terms of total RPC processing time, the RARPC can improve the performance up to 50% compared to Sun NFS/RPC, for a two-machine client/server model.<
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