Group communication is a useful mechanism guaranteeing consistency among replicated objects. The existing approaches do not allow transparent plug-in of group communication protocols into CORBA. They either require modification of CORBA or OS, or provide no room for incorporating group communication transport protocols into CORBA. We thus propose a generic group communication framework that allows transparent plug-in of various group communication protocols with no modification of existing CORBA. We extend the open communications interface (OCI) to support interoperability, reusability of existing group communication, and independency on ORB and OS. We also define the group communication inter-ORB protocol (GCIOP) as a group communication instantiation of the general inter-ORB protocol (GIOP) that encapsulates underlying group communication protocols. The proposed scheme can be exploited for fault-tolerant CORBA (FT CORBA)
