A survey on standards for real-time distribution middleware

Abstract

This survey covers distribution standards oriented to the development of distributed real-time systems. Currently, there are many distribution standards that provide a wide and different set of real-time facilities to control the temporal aspects of applications. Besides giving a general overview of these standards, we describe the real-time mechanisms proposed by each standard to manage both processor and network resources, discuss whether the available facilities are sufficient to guarantee determinism throughout the whole application, and identify a set of features and deployment options that would be desirable in any real-time distribution middleware regardless of its distribution model and standard. The survey identifies open issues and key challenges for future research.