A microkernel middleware architecture for distributed embedded real-time systems

Abstract

Today more and more embedded real-time systems are implemented in a distributed way. These distributed embedded systems consist of a few controllers up to several hundreds. Distribution and parallelism in the design of embedded real-time systems increase the engineering challenges and require new methodological framework based on middleware. Our research work focuses on the development of a middleware that supports the design of heterogeneous distributed real-time systems and allows the use of small microcontrollers as computation nodes. Our study is aimed to a new approach that led to the development of OSA+-a scalable service-oriented real-time middleware architecture. This middleware has been used as the basic platform for different domain applications: (i) conception of an autonomous guided vehicle system based on multithreaded Java microcontrollers and (ii) development of a permanent monitoring distributed system for an oil drilling application. This paper presents the basic architecture of OSA+ and its implementation for the distributed real-time embedded systems design.