Middleware extensions that trade consistency for availability

Replicated distributed object systems are deployed to provide timely and reliable services to actors at distributed locations. This paper treats applications in which data updates are dependent on satisfaction of integrity constraints over multiple objects. We propose a means of achieving higher availability by providing partition-awareness in middleware. The general approach has been illustrated by implementing a number of CORBA extensions that trade consistency for availability during network partitions. This paper contains a thorough experimental evaluation that shows the gains and costs of our approach. The experiments clearly illustrate the benefit of our protocols in terms of significantly higher availability and number of performed operations.