RMSDDS

Title

Reflective Middleware Support for Dynamic Data-Centric Systems (RMSDDS)

ASNA project manager

M.J. van Sinderen

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Tel.: +31-53-4893677

Email: sinderen@cs.utwente.nl

Project coordinator

CTIT

Project type

NWO Casimir

Start / End date

01.03.2006 / 31.12.2008

Budget

281 kEuro

Project fte

1.6 fte/year (total 4.5 fte)

ASNA fte

0.4 fte/year

Participants

CTIT, Thales Hengelo

Project website

http://rmsdds.ctit.utwente.nl/

Project summary

The goal of this project is to develop a novel reflective meta-architecture for data-centric middleware. The proposed middleware enhancements shall significantly improve the support for data-centric distributed applications that pose high (real-time) quality demands and operate in a dynamic environment.

Many real-time applications have a requirement to model some of their communication patterns as a pure data-centric exchange, where applications publish (supply or stream) “data” which are then available to remote applications that are interested in them. Relevant real-time applications can be found in C4ISR (Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), industrial automation, distributed control and simulation, telecom equipment control, sensor networks and network management systems. More generally any application requiring (selective) information dissemination is a candidate for a data-centric architecture. The research focuses on enhancing the communication model and mechanisms of Publish/Subscribe (pub/sub) middleware, which has gained significant attention as a supporting infrastructure for data-centric distributed applications.

The motivation for the research is that the conventional pub/sub middleware technologies (for example, Splice and NDDS) lack support for certain functional and quality demands and are not adaptable to dynamically changing configurations and conditions. The next-generation reflective middleware is proposed as a principled and efficient way of dealing with highly dynamic environments. This research specifically addresses meta models, reflection techniques, adaptation techniques and policies to handle changes in the application layer and in the (underlying resources of the) infrastructure layer, such that applications can operate in a dynamic environment.