Distributed IPC Using Virtual Device Driver in Monolithic Kernel

The applications of distributed computing are ubiquitous ranging from client/server based Internet systems to the cluster or grid and cloud computing systems. The distributed applications require efficient and transparent distributed interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism as a service from the operating systems supporting those applications. This paper describes the designed architecture and implementation of kernel-level distributed IPC mechanism using device driver framework offering transparency and high performance. The implementation is made in Linux monolithic kernel and the performance is measured by conducting the experiments in real-life execution environments. The experimental data illustrate that the distributed IPC in Ethernet network takes 629Ýs for small messages (25Bytes) and 2929Ýs for relatively large messages (5KB). The experiments in wireless network achieve 34528Ýs and 42511Ýs for the small and large messages, respectively. On the average, the designed architecture achieves distributed IPC time as 0.899Ýs/Byte in Ethernet and 92.628Ýs/Byte in wireless network environments. The proposed architecture and implementation offer 12.73% ~ 75.84% enhanced performance as compared to other distributed IPC models depending upon data length.