A Component-Based Middleware for a Reliable Distributed and Reconfigurable Spacecraft Onboard Computer

Abstract

Emerging applications for space missions require increasing processing performance from the onboard computers. DLR's project "Onboard Computer-Next Generation" (OBC-NG) develops a distributed, reconfigurable computer architecture to provide increased performance while maintaining the high reliability of classical spacecraft computer architectures. Growing system complexity requires an advanced onboard middleware, handling distributed (real-time) applications and error mitigation by reconfiguration. The OBC-NG middleware follows the Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) approach. Using composite components, applications and management tasks can easily be distributed and relocated on the processing nodes of the network. Additionally, reuse of components for future missions is facilitated. This paper presents the flexible middleware architecture, the composite component framework, the middleware services and the model-driven Application Programming Interface (API) design of OBC-NG. Tests are conducted to validate the middleware concept and to investigate the reconfiguration efficiency as well as the reliability of the system. A relevant use case shows the advantages of CBSE for the development of distributed reconfigurable onboard software.

ScOSA: application development for a high-performance space qualified onboard computing platform

“…The middleware is responsible for task execution, distributing tasks between different nodes, handling communication between the nodes and failure detection (through the observation of other nodes) and recovery. 6 The middleware also offers an API for the applications, for using the distributed computing and failure recovery features of the distributed Tasking framework. The middleware is not tagged to the onboard computing hardware.…”