Interchangeable scheduling policies in real-time middleware for distribution

  • Authors:

  • Juan López Campos;J. Javier Gutiérrez;Michael González Harbour

  • Affiliations:

  • Departamento de Electrónica y Computadores, Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain;Departamento de Electrónica y Computadores, Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain;Departamento de Electrónica y Computadores, Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Ada-Europe'06 Proceedings of the 11th Ada-Europe international conference on Reliable Software Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

When a middleware layer is designed for providing semi-transparent distribution facilities to real-time applications, a trade-off must be made between the expressiveness and control capabilities of the real-time parameters used, and the simplicity of usage. Middleware specifications such as RT-CORBA or Ada's Distributed Systems Annex (DSA) rely on the use of priorities to map the timing requirements of the application, thus restricting the possible scheduling policies. This paper presents a generic technique to express complex scheduling and timing parameters of distributed transactions, allowing real-time middleware implementations to change their scheduling policies for both the processing nodes and the networks. The technique has been tested in an implementation of Ada's DSA, providing two interchangeable policies: a fixed-priority scheduler, and a complex contract-based flexible scheduler.