Abstract. Distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) applications possess stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements, such as predictability, latency, and throughput constraints. Real-Time CORBA, an open middleware standard, allows DRE applications to allocate, schedule, and control resources to ensure predictable end-to-end QoS. The Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) has been developed to provide extensions to Java so that it can be used for real-time systems, in order to bring Java's advantages, such as portability and ease of use, to real-time applications. In this paper, we describe RTZen, an implementation of a Real-Time CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB), designed to comply with the restrictions imposed by RTSJ. RTZen is designed to eliminate the unpredictability caused by garbage collection and improper support for thread scheduling through the use of appropriate data structures, threading models, and memory scopes. RTZen's architecture is also designed to hide the complexities of RTSJ related to distributed programming from the application developer. Empirical results show that RTZen is highly predictable and has acceptable performance. RTZen therefore demonstrates that Real-Time CORBA middleware implemented in real-time Java can meet stringent QoS requirements of DRE applications, while supporting safer, easier, cheaper, and faster development in real-time Java.
Component frameworks simplify development of enterprise systems and enable code reuse, but most frameworks are unpredictable and hence unsuitable for embedded or real-time systems. Similarly, Java is increasingly being used to build embedded system software because of its portability and ease of use. The Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) reduces the unpredictability in Java execution times by eliminating the need for a garbage collector. However, it introduces programming complexity that makes it difficult to build non-trivial applications. To bring the advantages of Java component development to DRE systems, while simultaneously simplifying the use of RTSJ, therefore, we have developed a new lightweight component model for RTSJ called Compadres. Compadres offers the following advantages: 1) Simple component definition in Java that abstracts away RTSJ memory management complexity; 2) System assembly from components by connecting ports that communicate through strongly-typed objects; 3) The Compadres compiler that automatically generates the scoped memory architecture for components, while the component framework handles communication between the components. To validate this work, we construct a nontrivial example application using the component framework, a simple real-time CORBA implementation. We then analyze the performance and efficiency of our component example versus a non-component example, RTZen. Our measurements show that our Compadres example built with components incurs only minor time overhead as compared to a comparable hand-coded example.
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