Many real-time application domains can benefit from flexible and open distributed architectures, such as those defined by the CORBA specification. CORBA is an architecture for distributed object computing being standardized by the OMG. Although CORBA is well-suited for conventional request/response applications, CORBA implementations are not yet suited for real-time applications due to the lack of key quality of service (QoS) features and performance optimizations. This paper makes three contributions to the design of real-time CORBA systems. First, the paper describes the design of TAO, which is our high-performance, real-time CORBA 2.0-compliant implementation that runs on a range of OS platforms with real-time features including VxWorks, Chorus, Solaris 2.x, and Windows NT. Second, it presents TAO's real-time scheduling service that can provide QoS guarantees for deterministic real-time CORBA applications. Finally, the paper presents performance measurements that demonstrate the effects of priority inversion and non-determinism in conventional CORBA implementations and how these hazards are avoided in TAO. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
