Design, Implementation and Performance Evaluation of a High Performance CORBA Group Membership Protocol*

1 Introduction Group communication services have been proposed as mechanisms to construct high performance, highly available, dependable, and real-time applications [21, 3, 6, 4, 17, 2, 10, 23]. These services comprise of a set of fault-tolerant protocols that provide some consistent information to a group of cooperating processes running on different processors. The key idea is that the currently running members, i.e the current group of servers, maintain a consistent replicated service state. If one member fails, the others form a new group and continue to provide the service