Measuring and optimizing CORBA latency and scalability over high-speed networks

There is increasing demand to extend object-oriented middleware, such as OMG CORBA, to support applications with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, conventional CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB) implementations incur high latency and low scalability when used for performance-sensitive applications. These inefficiencies discourage developers from using CORBA for mission/life-critical applications such as real-time avionics, telecom call processing, and medical imaging. This paper provides two contributions to the research on CORBA performance. First, we systematically analyze the latency and scalability of two widely used CORBA ORBs, VisiBroker and Orbix. These results reveal key sources of overhead in conventional ORBs. Second, we describe techniques used to improve latency and scalability in TAO, which is a high-performance, real-time implementation of CORBA. Although conventional ORBs do not yet provide adequate QoS guarantees to applications, our research results indicate ii is possible to implement ORBs that can support high-performance, real-time applications.