Performance evaluation of Java architectures in embedded real-time systems

The embedded real-time development community is investigating different approaches in order to provide modularity and reuse features for system design in this area, as well as a more appropriate mapping technique between requirements and implementation. The Java technology is very promising for this community, mainly after the research efforts on its real-time extension RTSJ-real-time specification for Java. However, there are still some critic factors related to the adoption of Java for real-time applications, and some of them deserve special attention. This paper reports a study of some of these decisive factors, such as the choice of the underlying operating system, the use of a middleware (virtual machine) or a native code, and the use of the Java real-time API (RTSJ).