Architectural Support for Mobile Objects in Large Scale Distributed Systems

The paper discusses the relevant features of an object support system that provides basic facilities for building flexible distributed applications in environments where objects can be mobile and occasional failures (node crashes, real or virtual network partitions) are possible. These facilities are for naming, locating and invoking objects, persistence and garbage collection. One of the key features is an efficient and reliable object reference scheme that is particularly good for dealing with mobile objects. The design presented scales to systems of arbitrary size and is portable since it only requires a few standard capabilities from the underlying operating system.