Connection-oriented real-time communication for mission critical applications-an introduction to NetEx: a portable and efficient tool kit

We report our project aimed at the design and implementation of a mid-ware tool kit, called NetEx, that provides deadline-guaranteed and connection-oriented communication services at the application layer. NetEx comprises a Host Traffic Manager (HTM) and a Network Traffic Manager (NTM). An HTM resides in each participating host while the NTM can be implemented either at a central host or in a distributed manner. The HTM performs traffic scheduling and enforces traffic regulation at individual hosts. The NTM is the decision maker on connection admission control. We argue that portability and efficiency are two fundamental issues one has to address in the design of such a middle-ware tool kit. We present strategies adopted by NetEx in order to support portability and efficiency. We report system performance based on several benchmarks.