A nested invocation suppression mechanism for active replication fault-tolerant CORBA

Active replication is a common approach to building highly available and reliable distributed software applications. The redundant nested invocation (RNI) problem arises when servers in a replicated group issues nested invocations to other server groups in response to a client invocation. Automatic suppression of RNI is always a desirable solution, yet it is usually a difficult design issue. If the system has multithreading support, the difficulties of implementation increase dramatically. Intuitively, to design a deterministic thread execution control mechanism is a possible approach. Unfortunately, some modern operating systems implement thread on kernel level for execution fairness. For the kernel thread case, modification on thread control implies modifying the operating system kernel. This approach loses system portability which is one of the important requirements of CORBA or middleware. In this work, we propose a mechanism to perform the auto-suppression of redundant nested invocation in an active replication fault-tolerant (FT) CORBA system. Besides the mechanism design, we discuss the design correctness semantic and the correctness proof of our design.