Evaluation of data distribution techniques in a CORBA-based telerobotic system

Distributed telerobotic applications exploiting Internet-related technologies, such as virtual laboratories and on-line robots, require effective techniques for timely delivery of sensory data to remote clients. In these systems, there is a need to distribute increasing quantities of sensory data to a potentially large number of clients during system operation. In this paper, we describe and evaluate three implementations of a sensory data distribution subsystem in the context of a CORBA-based framework for telerobotic applications. Experimental results show that solutions exploiting CORBA services and based on the event channel paradigm represent a viable alternative to ad-hoc solutions. The overhead associated to CORBA services becomes less significant with larger message size. Moreover, these services ensure portability, extensibility, reduction in programming complexity, and improved scalability when the number of clients increases.