Directly and Indirectly Synchronous Communication Mechanisms for Client-Server Systems Using Event-Based Asynchronous Communication Framework

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a synchronous communication mechanism that can be used with asynchronous communication in an event-based communication framework (CM). The proposed synchronous communication mechanism supports directly synchronous communication between client and server, indirectly synchronous communication between two clients through server mediation, and indirectly one-to-many synchronous communication with multiple clients. In order to support synchronous communication, the CM uses the synchronization mechanism between the main thread and the processing thread while maintaining the multi-thread structure. The application can utilize both the asynchronous and the synchronous communication service of the CM together according to its requirements. For performance analysis, we compared the CM synchronous and asynchronous communication methods with qualitative and quantitative experiments, respectively. Through qualitative analysis, developing applications using synchronous services can more intuitively design application logic than asynchronous services. From the quantitative experiment, we also verified that the response delay time in the synchronous method is shorter than that in the asynchronous method although the difference in the response delay is not large.

Keywords

• Asynchronous communication
• client-server system
• event-based communication framework
• synchronous communication
• thread synchronization