Supporting Configurable Real-Time Communication Services

Constructing communication services that provide real-time guarantees is important for many applications built on distributed systems. While a variety of such services have been designed and implemented, most are targeted for specific applications and are correspondingly difficult to adapt to differing requirements in other areas. This paper presents an approach to building configurable and customized versions of real-time communication services based on software modules called micro-protocols. Each micro-protocol implements a different semantic property or property variant, and interacts with other micro-protocols using an event-driven model supported by a runtime system providing real-time guarantees. The programming model is presented, together with an implementation design based on the x-kernel model for building network subsystems and the OSF/RI MK 7.2 operating system. The design of a highly-configurable real-time channel abstraction built using this approach is also given. Proto..