CERC Technical Report Series

Research Note

CERC-TR-RN-91-003

Communication Mechanisms for Heterogeneous Networks:

RPC vs Message Passing

R. Kannan

Vangati R. Narendar

M. Packer

April 1991

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This effort has been sponsored by Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under contract No. MDA972-88-C-0047 for DARPA Initiative in Concurrent Engineering (DICE).

Concurrent Engineering Research Center

West Virginia Univeraisity

Drawer 2000, Morgantown WV 26505

Communication Mechanisms for Heterogenous Networks

CERC-TR-RN-91-003 Kannan, Vangati and Packer

Communication Mechanisms for Heterogeneous Networks:1

RPC vs Message Passing

Raman Kannan, Narender R. Vangati and Michael Packer

Concurrent Engineering Research Center

West Virginia University

Introduction

Application interoperability is one of the fundamental requirements for group-work as well as network computing. Applications have a need to interoperate in numerous ways and one of the imperatives for interoperability is the availability of flexible and efficient communication mechanisms. Communication Mechanisms, here, are software abstractions that enable processes to exchange information between one another, in other words, abstractions that enable interprocess communication (IPC). The purpose of this report is to bring out the various features of commonly available IPC mechanisms and the effectiveness of these mechanisms in building distributed systems.