Uwe Rastofer and Frank Bellosa

University of Erlangen, Technical Report TR-I4-99-01, September 1999

Abstract:

Currently popular component models like Microsoft's COM [EdEd98] and Sun's Java Beans [Eng97] rely on a more or less uniform execution platform. It is assumed that on this platform a component can use nearly unlimited virtual memory, that there are no other time constraints apart from the user's patience, and that one component's resource usage will not have any influence on other components. So these component models are only concerned with functionality and do not explicitly address non-functional issues like the usage of resources.

These assumptions do no longer hold in the field of distributed embedded real-time systems. There is a variety of different hardware architectures and operating systems on the embedded market which creates a large number of diverse execution platforms. Resources like processor time and memory are scarce and one component can easily influence others by consuming too many resources. Distribution issues play an important role as well. Execution times are much larger when a component on different node has to be contacted.

So on the one hand, to produce a correctly working embedded real-time system all properties of the execution environment have to be taken into account and the components have to be adapted to this environment. On the other hand, the (base) functionality of these components is still independent of a special execution environment. To overcome platform-specific components we propose a component model that separates the component's functionality from platform-specific issues like concurrency, synchronization, and distribution. Components are developed in a platformindependent model and are later mapped to execution environments that introduce platform-specific features.

BibTex:

@techreport{rastofer99componentmodel,
  author = {Uwe Rastofer and Frank Bellosa},
  title = {A Component Model for Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems},
  booktitle = {Technical Report},
  number = {TR-I4-99-01},
  month = sep,
  year = 1999,
  affiliation = {University of Erlangen, Germany},
  url = {http://i30www.ira.uka.de/}
}