Improving the scalability of the CORBA event service with a multi-agent load balancing algorithm

The event service of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is useful in supporting decoupled and asynchronous communication between distributed object components. However, the specification of the event service standard does not require implementation to provide facilities to guarantee efficient event/data delivery. Consequently, applications in which a large number of objects need to communicate via an event service channel may suffer from poor performance. In this paper, a generic CORBA-based framework is proposed to tackle this scalability problem. Two techniques are applied; namely, event channel federation and load balancing. The solution is transparent in the sense that it exports the same IDL interface as the original event service. We explore three critical dimensions underlying the design of the load-balancing algorithm and conduct experiments to evaluate their impact on the overall performance of the framework. The results provide some useful insights into the improvement of the scalability of the event service.