A survey of asynchronous remote procedure calls

ABSTRACT

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a popular paradigm for interprocess communication in distributed systems. It is simple, flexible and powerful. However, most of the RPC systems today are synchronous in nature, and hence fail to exploit fully the parallelism inherent in distributed applications. In view of this, various asynchronous RPC systems have been designed and implemented to achieve higher parallelism while retaining the familiarity and simplicity of synchronous RPC. Asynchronous RPC calls do not block the caller (client) and the replies can be received as and when they are needed, thus allowing the client execution to proceed locally in parallel with the callee (server) invocation. Asynchronous RPC calls can be classified into two types depending on whether the calls return a value. Most asynchronous RPC systems only support calls that do not return a value, and few support both classes. In this paper, an analysis and comparison of various asynchronous RPC systems are presented.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.7 Organization and Design
          Subjects: Distributed systems

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Distributed databases

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
asynchronous RPC, distributed systems, high-throughput, interprocess communication (IPC), intra-machine call, low-latency, parallelism, remote procedure call (RPC), synchronous RPC, transport-independent