Active Software Replication through a Three-Tier Approach

A replication logic is the set of protocols and mechanisms implementing a software replication technique. A three-tier approach to replication consists in separating the replication logic from both clients and replicated servers by embedding such logic in a middle-tier. In this paper we first introduce the fundamental concepts underlying three-tier replication. This approach has two main practical advantages: (i) it allows to maintain consistency among the state of server replicas deployed within an asynchronous distributed system and (ii) it supports very thin clients. Then we present the Interoperable Replication Logic (IRL) architecture, which is a Fault Tolerant CORBA compliant infrastructure exploiting a three-tier approach to replicate stateful deterministic CORBA objects. In this context, we illustrate the three-tier replication protocol currently implemented in our IRL prototype and a performance analysis that shows the feasibility of the three-tier approach to software replication.