Reliable messaging using the CORBA Notification Service

With the growing popularity of the CORBA architecture as a distributed computing infrastructure standard, the need for a reliable CORBA messaging solution is being increasingly felt. The Event Service, which is the first such solution, provides inadequate event delivery guarantees and lacks many important features such as configurable quality of service and filtering. A Notification Service has since been specified to address these shortcomings and to extend the Event Service functionality. This paper briefly looks at the features of the Notification Service and explains in detail the Notification Service support for reliable messaging. The highest event delivery guarantee possible with the CORBA Notification Service is deduced and the delivery semantics provided is examined. A framework for architecting reliable messaging systems using the CORBA Notification Service is proposed. The performance of the Notification Service is analyzed to determine the performance penalty, for increased reliability, and the effect of event size, number of clients and filtering on throughput.