Reliable real-time communication in cooperative mobile applications

Embedded systems are expected to provide increasingly complex and safety-critical services that will, sooner or later, require the cooperation of several such systems for their fulfillment. In particular, coordinating the access to shared physical and information technological resources will become a general problem. Examples are mobile robots in industrial automation or car-to-car coordination for future traffic control applications. In such applications, cooperation is subject to strong real-time and reliability requirements. In this paper, we present an architecture that allows autonomous mobile systems to schedule shared resources in real-time using their own wireless distributed infrastructure. In this architecture, there is a clear separation between the application-specific scheduling part and the application independent communication part that constitutes the real-time and reliability hardcore of the system. The latter provides clock synchronization, real-time atomic multicast, and real-time group membership based on an IEEE 802.11 standard wireless LAN. An application prototype shows how the architecture can be used in future mobile cooperative applications.