A Lightweight and High Performance Remote Procedure Call Framework for Cross Platform Communication

Remote procedure calls (RPC) are widely used for building distributed systems for about 40 years. There are several RPC implementations addressing different purposes. Some RPC mechanisms are general purpose systems and provide a number of calling patterns for functionality, hence they do not emphasize performance. On the other hand, a small number of RPC mechanisms are implemented with performance as the main concern. Such RPC implementations concentrate on reducing the size of the transferred RPC messages. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight and high performance RPC mechanism (HPRPC) that uses our own high performance data serializer. We compare our RPC system's performance with a well-known RPC implementation, gRPC, that addresses both providing various calling patterns and reducing the size of the RPC messages. The experiment results clearly indicate that HPRPC performs better than gRPC in terms of communication overhead. Therefore, we propose our RPC mechanism as a suitable candidate for high performance and real time systems.