Supporting distributed real-time objects

This paper describes a distributed environment for real-time applications. The context of this research is Open Distributed Processing (ODP). It is the stringent timeliness and performance requirements of real-time applications that are the primary source of problems posed by real-time applications. The services provided by existing distributed system environments predate the present concerns of real-time applications and provide insufficient and inappropriate services for supporting them. For example, current standards for distributed processing, such as the OSF DCE, OMG CORBA and ISO RM-ODP make no mention of real-time issues. This paper shows how it is possible to extend a distributed system environment to support real-time applications and hence help avoid these problems. The principal issues covered by this paper are: real-time system environment characteristics, i.e. the problems to be addressed; distributed real-time object execution; and a distributed real-time programming model.<>