iLAND: An Enhanced Middleware for Real-Time Reconfiguration of Service Oriented Distributed Real-Time Systems

Future networked embedded systems will be complex deployments deeply integrated in the environment that they monitor. They will have to react to both user and environmental events, and this may require modifying their structure to handle the changing situations. In a number of domains including industrial environments, this modification of the system structure will need to take place in real time. This is a hard problem that will require novel and paradigmatic solutions involving cross-domain knowledge to build a middleware for enabling real-time interaction between nodes allowing time-bounded reconfiguration. For supporting real-time, this middleware must be vertically architected in a modular way from the network and operating system levels up to the application software and the real-time policies for achieving time-bounded behavior. This paper presents a middleware that addresses these characteristics supporting timely reconfiguration in distributed real-time systems based on services. Experimental results are shown to validate the middleware in an actual small-scale video prototype.