Two alternative RMI models for real-time distributed applications

Java's popularity, facilities and platform independence have made it an interesting language for the real time community. The RTSJ (real-time specification for Java) is a Java extension to allow the development of real-time systems. RTSJ does not supply any support for the development of real-time distributed systems. The goal of this work is to define support for this type of systems, based on RMI (remote method invocation). However, the high diversity of real-time systems implies that there is not a single RT-RMI definition that satisfies their requirements. This article presents the basics of two real-time RMI approaches: safety critical RMI, to support hard real-time and high integrity requirements, and quality of service RMI for soft real-time systems, which is based on resource reservation to provide some minimal required quality.