Designing an Agent Synthesis System for Cross-RPC Communication

Remote procedure call (RPC) is the most popular paradigm used today to build distributed systems and applications. As a consequence, the term “RPC” has grown to include a range of vastly different protocols above the transport layer. A resulting problem is that programs often use different RPC protocols, cannot be interconnected directly, and building a solution for each case in a large heterogeneous environment is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we describe the design of a system that can synthesize programs (RPC agents) to accommodate RPC heterogeneities. Because of its synthesis capability, our system also facilitates the design and implementation of new RPC protocols through rapid prototyping. We have built a prototype system to validate the design and to estimate the agent development costs and cross-RPC performance. Our evaluation shows that our synthesis approach provides a more general solution than existing approaches do, and with lower software development and maintenance costs, while maintaining reasonable cross-RPC performance.