Coordination Protocol and Admission Control for Distributed Services in System-of-Systems With Real-Time Requirements

System-of-Systems (SoS) offer unprecedented potential for new types of emerging services, which significantly exceed the capabilities of the constituting systems. SoS in safety-critical domains (e.g., medical applications, smart grid, disaster recovery, defense) are prominent examples, but they have stringent real-time and reliability requirements. Therefore, a suitable temporal and spatial allocation of resources is required both within each constituent system and in the wide area networks between them. This paper introduces an algorithm for admission control and resources’ allocation, which considers these requirements and the autonomy of the constituent systems. To simulate a realistic admission control and resources’ allocation process of a typical SoS network, a simulated case study with eight constituent systems, six services, and twenty-five processes/requests is developed. The suggested admission control and resources’ allocation process’s performance is measured in terms of gain in the execution time and blockage probability. A sensitivity analysis is carried out to evaluate the influence of the number of constituent systems and the number of services sought by the received processes/requests on the efficacy of the proposed process. The results show that the proposed admission control and resources’ allocation process have very low blockage probability, high gain in the execution time, and high resources’ utilization.