Certain Improvements In Marshalling

The interaction between components and objects in a distributed environment should be highly efficient and transparent to the application programmer. High efficiency can be achieved by improving the inter-processor communication (IPC) mechanism in micro kernels, while transparency can be achieved through interface definition languages (IDLs). Different encoding mechanisms like Extended Data Representation (XDR), Network Data Representation (NDR) and Common Data Representation (CDR) facilitate inter-component communication transparently and efficiently. Marshalling procedures convert data in local machine representation into common network representations. Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) uses CDR representation to encode data. This paper proposes certain changes that can be incorporated in the CDR encoding mechanism, to achieve better efficiency in transmission. The changes include the following: A bit representation for the boolean array; Removing data alignment at word boundaries; Exact allocation of send and receive buffer space depending on the data type being transmitted; Adopting inlining mechanism for some primitive data types to improve efficiency.