A framework for adaptive real-time applications: the declarative real-time OSGi component model
This provides a comprehensive solution for developers using OSGi frameworks who need real-time capabilities, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing component models.
The paper tackles the lack of standard real-time support in OSGi applications by proposing a declarative real-time component model, which enables dynamic adaptation and reconfiguration while maintaining real-time contracts, with a prototype showing good real-time performance in a simulated control system.
Nowadays, more and more applications require OSGi to have some form of real-time support, which is currently very limited. The resulting closed-system solutions lack of a standard management scheme which forbids standard, system-wide policies for real-time system's deployment, adaptation, and reconfiguration. In order to tackle this problem, this paper proposes a declarative real-time component model. In this model, the distinguishing real-time contract of each component is declaratively described, and a general component real-time management interface is designed. They are used to maintain an accurate view of existing real-time components' promised contracts. A real-time component runtime service is designed to control the whole lifecycle of the components. By using global information and general control interface, it can adjust the system continue to operate without impairing the deployed components' real-time contracts in the face of run-time changes. This system allows itself to be easily extended with other constraint resolving policies to fit different context. The prototype has been tested into a simulated control system. The result shows this framework can provide good real time performance while still provides real-time component dynamicity support as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive solution providing explicit real-time support from design to execution in OSGi framework.