Data services in distributed real-time embedded systems

Abstract

The computing systems are becoming deeply embedded into ordinary life and interact with physical processes and events. They monitor the physical world with sensors and provide appropriate reaction and control over it. This cyber-physical interaction, which occurs through ubiquitous embedded systems, has the potential to transform how humans interact with and control the physical world. Applications of such systems include infrastructure management and environmental monitoring. For these applications, the demand for real-time data services is increasing since they are inherently data-intensive. However, providing real-time data services in such large-scale and geographically distributed environment is a challenging task. In particular, both unpredictable communicational delays and computational workloads of large-scale distributed systems can lead to large number of deadline misses. In this paper, we propose a real-time data service architecture called DRACON (Decentralized data Replication And CONtrol), which is designed to support large-scale distributed real-time applications. DRACON uses cluster-based replica-sharing and a decentralized control structure to address communication and computational unpredictability. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.