Abstract

As quality of service (QoS)-enabled component mid-dleware technologies gain widespread acceptance to build distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems, it be-comes necessary for these technologies to support real-time publish/subscribe services, which is a key requirement of a large class of DRE systems. To date there have been very limited systematic studies evaluating different approaches to integrating real-time publish/subscribe services in QoS-enabled component middleware. This paper makes two con-tributions in addressing these key research questions. First, we evaluate the pros and cons of three different design al-ternatives for integrating publish/subscribe services within QoS-enabled component middleware. Second, we empiri-cally evaluate the performance of our container-based de-sign and compare it with mature object-oriented real-time publish/subscribe implementations. Our studies reveal that both the performance and scalability of our design and im-plementation are comparable to its object-oriented coun-terpart, which provides a key guidance to the suitability of component technologies for DRE systems.