A novel Java RMI middleware design for active networks

Java RMI (remote method invocation) facilitates the complicated procedure of developing large-scale distributed applications. However, this paradigm suffers from a centralized bottleneck problem when many clients send requests to a server simultaneously. We propose a novel middleware design called ActiveRMI to enhance RMI performance by employing active networks infrastructure with a code caching scheme. With ActiveRMI, remote services can be dynamically cached and built up at intermediate active routers to process further client requests as soon. Therefore, active RMI achieves three improvements: (1) the RMI performance is improved; (2) system availability is increased and (3) system load and network traffic is reduced. As the preliminary experiments show, programmers can use the code generation tool ARMIGen to design ActiveRMI applications effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, the user response time of RMI applications can be highly improved. The promising results conduce to the future development of next generation middleware on active networks.