Communication channel prioritization in a publish-subscribe architecture

Real-Time communication is important in distributed applications when timing constraints on task execution and data processing play a fundamental role. Software engineering does not yet specify how real-time properties should be integrated into a publish/subscribe middleware. This article describes an approach for integration of priority Quality of Service (QoS) in a publish/subscribe middleware. The basic idea is to leverage the operating system functionalities to provide a framework where specific communication channels can be prioritized at run-time. This paper presents an implementation of our approach in the YARP (Yet Another Robot Platform) open source middleware and a preliminary experimental evaluation of its performance.