MidART - Middleware for real-time distributed systems for industrial applications

We propose middleware which works on widely used commercial off-the-shelf platforms (UDP/IP, FastEthernet, and Windows NT or commercial real-time kernels) to realize real-time distributed services for plant monitoring and control systems. It is not suitable to use TCP/IP for the systems because of its unpredictable re-transmission, while, as well known, UDP/IP does not guarantee certain arrivals of packets and it is also not acceptable for the systems. With UDP/IP, pack ets are lost mainly because of collisions in a network and buffer overflows. To avoid these packet losses, the middleware controls scheduling of all tile packets transmitted between the nodes in a distributed system and prevents excessive collisions and buffer overflows. The middleware provides a necessary set of functions for plant monitoring and control applications. The middleware on each node in a distributed system consists of library functions and run-time modules. An application program on tile node is required to use these library functions according to the rules the middleware provides. In this way the middleware can manage all the traffic among the nodes in the system. Receiving requests from the application via library functions, the run-time module of the middleware schedules transmission of messages to other nodes, avoiding unexpected delivery delays or buffer overflows, The module also guarantees application-to-application quality of service (QoS), such as transmission period and delivery deadline, required by the applications. This is achieved by assigning the resources not shared by other services to each distributed service and scheduling these resources so as not to violate the assignment. Here, resources include maximum numbers of packets which a node can receive or send in a specific period (20 msec, for example). We show implementation of tile middleware to make it clear how to guarantee application-to-application QoS with some application examples.