Patterns and performance of distributed real-time and embedded publisher/subscriber architectures

Abstract

This paper makes four contributions to the design and evaluation of publisher/subscriber architectures for distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) applications. First, it illustrates how a flexible publisher/subscriber architecture can be implemented using standard CORBA middleware. Second, it shows how to extend the standard CORBA publisher/subscriber architecture so it is suitable for DRE applications that require low latency and jitter, periodic rate-based event processing, and event filtering and correlation. Third, it explains how to address key performance-related design challenges faced when implementing a publisher/subscriber architecture suitable for DRE applications. Finally, the paper presents benchmarks that empirically demonstrate the predictability, latency, and utilization of a widely used real-time CORBA publisher/subscriber architecture. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to strike an effective balance between architectural flexibility and real-time quality of service for important classes of DRE applications. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.