A formal treatment of interference in remote procedure calls

Abstract

Remote procedure calls (rpcs) are a distributed programming facility enabling a client program to call a procedure that will be executed by a server computation running on a remote machine. It would be desirable that remote and local procedure calls could be treated uniformly, so as to make distribution transparent to the programmer. But transparency may be impaired if, because of communication or machine failures, computations serving the rpc of a client are allowed to interfere with computations serving later rpcs of that client. This paper gives a formal treatment of interference in rpcs. The formalism used is that of occurrence graphs. The main result obtained is a sufficient condition for rpcs to be interference-free. The practical significance of this condition is highlighted by relating it to interference prevention techniques often adopted in the design of rpc mechanisms.