Modular Architecture for Real-Time Contract-Based Framework

Component-based development of distributed real-time applications is a challenging task since satisfying timing requirements of individual components after system integration requires support from the component middleware which is not common today. This paper presents a software architecture of contract-based on-line resource reservation framework which can be used as a basis for a real-time component-based middleware. The main contribution of this architecture is its modularity which allows for support of many different resources such as CPU, networks, disks, FPGAs etc. The paper describes algorithms used to integrate the management of multiple resources and presents some experimental results from Linux implementation.