Performance Analysis of the CORBA Notification Service

As CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) gains popularity as a standard for portable, distributed, object-oriented computing, the need for a CORBA messaging solution is being increasingly felt. This led the Object Management Group (OMG) to specify a Notification Service that aims to provide a more flexible and robust messaging solution than the earlier Event Service. The Notification Service provides several configurable quality of service (QoS) and administrative settings that deal with issues such as reliability, event (message) delivery order and discard policies. Unlike in conventional queuing systems, some Notification Service QoS configurations can lead to discards from within the internal queues, requiring careful analysis and configuration if such discards are to be avoided or minimized. This paper presents stochastic models (based on continuous time Markov chains and queuing theory) to analyze the Notification Service delivery and discard policies in detail.