Modeling Adaptive Middleware and Its Applications to Military Tactical Datalinks

Open systems solutions and techniques have become the de facto standard for achieving interoperability between disparate, large-scale, legacy software systems. A key technology among open systems solutions and techniques is middleware. Middleware, in general, is used to isolate applications from dependencies introduced by hardware, operating systems, and other low-level aspects of system architectures. While middleware approaches are or will be integrated into operational military systems, many open questions exist about the appropriate areas to applying middleware. Adaptive middleware is middleware that provides an application with a run-time adaptation strategy, based upon system-level interfaces and properties. Adaptive middleware is an example of an active applied research area. Adaptive middleware is being developed and applied to meet the ever-increasing challenges set forth by the next generation of mission-critical distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. The driving force behind many next-generation DRE systems is the establishment of QoS requirements typically associated with workloads that vary dynamically. The Weapon System Open Architecture (WSOA), an adaptive middleware platform developed by Boeing, is modeled as a part of this research to determine the scalability of the architecture. The WSOA adaptive middleware was previously flight-tested with one tactical node, and the test results represent the performance baseline the architecture. The WSOA adaptive middleware is modeled with 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 tactical nodes. The results of the modeling and simulation is that the WSOA adaptive middleware can achieve the performance baseline achieved during the original flight-test, in the cases of 1, 2, and 4 tactical nodes. In addition, the results of the modeling and simulation also demonstrate that the WSOA adaptive middleware cannot achiev

Towards dynamic context discovery and composition

Context-awareness has been identified as a key characteristic for pervasive computing systems. As a variety of context-aware environments begin to flourish, pervasive applications shall have to interact different environments well. In this paper we propose extensions to the Strathclyde Context Infrastructure that gives context-aware applications the potential to adapt to unfamiliar environments transparently. We present a vision of a context discovery technique based on automated semantic reasoning about context information and services. The technique will offer higher levels of scalability and of interoperability with new context environments that cannot be achieved with current methods

Composing Systemic Aspects into Component-Oriented DOC Middleware

The advent and maturation of component-based middleware frameworks have sim-plified the development of large-scale distributed applications by separating system devel-opment and configuration concerns into different aspects that can be specified and com-posed at various stages of the application development lifecycle. Conventional component middleware technologies, such as J2EE [73] and .NET [34], were designed to meet the quality of service (QoS) requirements of enterprise applications, which focus largely on scalability and reliability. Therefore, conventional component middleware specifications and implementations are not well suited for distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) ap-plications with more stringent QoS requirements, such as low latency/jitter, timeliness, and online fault recovery. In the DRE system development community, a new generation of enhanced commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) middleware, such as Real-time CORBA 1.0 (RT-CORBA)[39], is increasingly gaining acceptance as (1) the cost and time required to develop and verify DRE applications precludes developers from implementing complex DRE applications from scratch and (2) implementations of standard COTS middleware specifications mature and encompass key QoS properties needed by DRE systems. However, although COTS middleware standardizes mechanisms to configure and control underlying OS support for an application’s QoS requirements, it does not yet provide sufficient abstractions to separate QoS policy configurations such as real-time performance requirements, from application functionality. Developers are therefore forced to configure QoS policies in an ad hoc way, and the code to configure these policies is often scattered throughout and tangled with other parts of a DRE system. As a result, it is hard for developers to configure, validate, modify, and evolve complex DRE systems consistently. It is therefore necessary to create a new generation of QoS-enabled component middleware that provides more comprehensive support for addressing QoS-related concerns modularly, so that they can be introduced and configured as separate systemic aspects. By analyzing and identifying the limitations of applying conventional middleware technologies for DRE applications, this dissertation presents a new design and its associated techniques for enhancing conventional component-oriented middleware to provide programmability of DRE relevant real-time QoS concerns. This design is realized in an implementation of the standard CORBA Component Model (CCM) [38], called the Component-Integrated ACE ORB (CIAO). This dissertation also presents both architectural analysis and empirical results that demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. This dissertation provides three contributions to the state of the art in composing systemic behaviors into component middleware frameworks. First, it illustrates how component middleware can simplify development and evolution of DRE applications while ensuring stringent QoS requirements by composing systemic QoS aspects. Second, it contributes to the design and implementation of QoS-enabled CCM by analyzing and documenting how systemic behaviors can be composed into component middleware. Finally, it presents empirical and analytical results to demonstrate the effectiveness and the advantage of composing systemic behaviors in component middleware. The work in this dissertation has a broader impact beyond the CCM in which it was developed, as it can be applied to other component-base middleware technologies which wish to support DRE applications

Integration of Data Distribution Service and distributed partitioned systems

[EN] Avionics systems are complex and time-critical systems that are progressively adopting more flexible (though equally robust) architectural designs. Although a number of current avionics systems follow federated architectures, the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) paradign is becoming the dominant style in the more modern developments. The reason is that the IMA concept promotes modular designs where applications with different levels of criticality can execute in an isolated manner in the same hardware. This approach complies with the requirements of cost, safety, and weight of the avionics systems. FACE standard (Future Airborne Capability Environment) defines the architectural baseline for easing integration in avionics systems, including the communication functions across distributed components. As specified in FACE, middleware will be integrated into avionics systems to ease development of portable components that can interoperate effectively. This paper describes the usage of publish-subscribe middleware (precisely, DDS - Data Distribution Service for real-time systems) into a fully distributed partitioned system. We describe, from a practical point of view, the integration of the middleware communication overhead into the hierarchical scheduling (as compliant with ARINC 653) to allow the usage of middleware in the partitions. We explain the design of a realiable communication setting, exemplified on a distributed monitoring application in a partitioned environment. The obtained implementation results show that, given the stable communication overhead of the middleware, it can be integrated in the time windows of partitions.This work has been partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through projects REM4VSS (TIN 2011-28339) and M2C2 (TIN2014-56158-C4-3-P).Garcia-Valls, M.; Domínguez-Poblete, J.; Eddine Touahria, I.; Lu, C. (2018). Integration of Data Distribution Service and distributed partitioned systems. Journal of Systems Architecture. 83:23-31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sysarc.2017.11.00123318

Extensible Modeling and Simulation Framework (XMSF) Opportunities for Web-Based Modeling and Simulation

Technical Opportunities Workshop Whitepaper, 14 June 2002Purpose: As the Department of Defense (DoD) is engaged in both warfighting and institutional transformation for the new millennium, DoD Modeling & Simulation (M&S) also needs to identify and adopt transformational technologies which provide direct tactical relevance to warfighters. Because the only software systems that composably scale to worldwide scope utilize the World Wide Web, it is evident that an extensible Web-based framework shows great promise to scale up the capabilities of M&S systems to meet the needs of training, analysis, acquisition, and the operational warfighter. By embracing commercial web technologies as a shared-communications platform and a ubiquitous-delivery framework, DoD M&S can fully leverage mainstream practices for enterprise-wide software development