Towards the integration of scoped memory in distributed real-time Java

Abstract

This paper presents a memory management solution for distributed real-time Java. The proposed model is targeted at distributed applications that require to keep their internal state and that consume a bounded memory size in their operation. The aim is to provide an alternative to the garbage collector for distributed real-time systems and to avoid the penalties it introduces. The approach is based on the usage of scoped memory defined in the real-time specification for Java (RTSJ). Our solution introduces constraints in the programming model and in the current distributed Java architecture. However, these are compensated by eliminating the dependency of the garbage collector in the end-to-end invocation and by achieving self-cleaning with respect to the memory consumed by remote invocations.