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The CORBA Event Service provides a flexible model for asynchronous communication among objects. However, the standard CORBA Event Service specification lacks important features required by real-time applications. For instance, operational flight programs for fighter aircraft have complex realtime processing requirements. This paper describes the design and performance of an object-oriented, real-time implementation of the CORBA Event Service that is designed to meet these requirements. This paper makes three contributions to the design and performance measurement of object-oriented real-time systems. First, it illustrates how to extend the CORBA Event Service so that it is suitable for real-time systems. These extensions support periodic rate-based event processing and efficient event filtering and correlation. Second, it describes how to develop object-oriented event dispatching and scheduling mechanisms that can provide real-time guarantees. Finally, the paper presents benchmarks tha...

Many real-time application domains can benefit from flexible and open distributed architectures, such as those defined by the CORBA specification. CORBA is an architecture for distributed object computing being standardized by the OMG. Although CORBA is well-suited for conventional request/response applications, CORBA implementations are not yet suited for real-time applications due to the lack of key quality of service (QoS) features and performance optimizations. This paper makes three contributions to the design of realtime CORBA systems. First, the paper describes the design of TAO, which is our high-performance, real-time CORBAcompliant implementation that runs on a range of OS platforms with real-time features including VxWorks, Chorus, Solaris 2.x, and Windows NT. Second, it presents TAO’s realtime scheduling service that can provide QoS guarantees for deterministic real-time CORBA applications. Finally, the paper presents performance measurements that demonstrate the effects of priority inversion and non-determinism in conventional CORBA implementations and how these hazards are avoided in TAO. 1

Many application domains (such as avionics, telecommunications, and multimedia) require real-time guarantees from the underlying networks, operating systems, and middleware components to achieve their quality of service (QoS) requirements. In addition to providing end-to-end QoS guarantees, applications in these domains must be flexible and reusable. Requirements for flexibility and reusability motivate the use of object-oriented middleware like the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). However, the performance of current CORBA implementations is not yet suited for hard real-time systems (e.g., avionics) and constrained latency systems (e.g., teleconferencing). This paper describes the architectural features and optimizations required to develop real-time ORB endsystems that can deliver end-to-end QoS guarantees to applications. While some operating systems, networks, and protocols now support real-time scheduling, they do not provide integrated solutions. The main thrust ...

This paper describes the design and performance of an object-oriented communication framework being developed by the Health Imaging division of Eastman Kodak and the Electronic Radiology Laboratory at Washington University School of Medicine. The framework is designed to meet the demands of next-generation electronic medical imaging systems, which must transfer extremely large quantities of data efficiently and flexibly in a distributed environment. A novel aspect of this framework is its seamless integration of flexible high-level CORBA distributed object computing middleware with efficient low-level socket network programming mechanisms. In the paper, we outline the design goals and software architecture of our framework, describe how we resolved design challenges, and illustrate the performance of the framework over high-speed ATM networks. 1 Introduction The demand for distributed electronic medical imaging systems (EMISs) is pushed by technological advances and pulled by economic...

There is increasing demand to extend object-oriented middleware, such as OMG CORBA, to support applications with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, conventional CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB) implementations incur high latency and low scalability when used for performance-sensitive applications. These inefficiencies discourage developers from using CORBA for mission/lifecritical applications such as real-time avionics, telecom call processing, and medical imaging. This paper provides two contributions to the research on CORBA performance. First, we systematically analyze the latency and scalability of two widely used CORBA ORBs, VisiBroker and Orbix. These results reveal key sources of overhead in conventional ORBs. Second, we describe techniques used to improve latency and scalability in TAO, which is a high-performance, real-time implementation of CORBA. Although conventional ORBs do not yet provide adequate QoS guarantees to applications, our research resu...

Efficient and predictable demultiplexing is necessary to provide real-time support for distributed object computing applications developed with CORBA. This paper presents two contributions to the study of demultiplexing for real-time CORBA endsystems. First, we present an empirical study of four CORBA request demultiplexing strategies (linear search, perfect hashing, dynamic hashing, and active demultiplexing) for a range of target objects and operations. Second, we describe how we are using the perfect hashing and active demultiplexing strategies to develop a highperformance, real-time ORB called TAO. Keywords: Communication software, Real-time CORBA, Demultiplexing. 1 Introduction CORBA is a distributed object computing middleware standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG)[14]. CORBA is designed to allow clients to invoke operations on remote objects without concern for where the object resides or what language the object is written in. In addition, CORBA shields applica...

This paper presents two contributions to the study of CORBA performance over high-speed networks. First, we measure the latency of various types and sizes of twoway client requests using a pair of widely used implementations of CORBA -- Orbix 2.1 and VisiBroker for C++ 2.0. Second, we use Orbix and VisiBroker to measure the scalability of CORBA servers in terms of the number of objects they can support efficiently. These experiments extend our previous work on CORBA performance for bandwidth-sensitive applications (such as satellite surveillance, medical imaging, and teleconferencing). Our results show that the latency for CORBA implementations is relatively high and server scalability is relatively low. Our latency experiments show that non-optimized internal buffering in CORBA implementations can cause substantial delay variance, which is unacceptable in many real-time or constrained-latency applications. Likewise, our scalability experiments reveal that neither Orbix nor VisiBroker...

There is increasing demand to extend Object Request Broker (ORB) middleware to support distributed applications with stringent real-time requirements. However, conventional ORB implementations, such as CORBA ORBs, exhibit substantial priority inversion and non-determinism, which makes them unsuitable for applications with deterministic real-time requirements. This paper provides two contributions to the study and design of real-time ORB middleware. First, it illustrates empirically why conventional ORBs do not yet support real-time quality of service. Second, it evaluates connection and concurrency software architectures to identify strategies that reduce priority inversion and non-determinism in real-time CORBA ORBs.

An Object Adapter is an integral part of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). An Object Adapter assists an Object Request Broker (ORB) in delivering client requests to server object implementations (servants). Services provided by an Object Adapter include: (1) generating and interpreting object references, (2) activating and deactivating servants, (3) demultiplexing requests to map object references onto their corresponding servants, and (4) collaborating with automatically-generated IDL skeletons to invoke operations on servants. This paper provides two contributions to the study of Object Adapters. First, it outlines the CORBA Portable Object Adapter (POA) specification, which is a recent addition to the CORBA standard that greatly simplifies the development of portable and extensible servants and server applications. The design goals, architectural components, and semantics of the POA are explained. Second, the paper describes the design choices made to adapt the...