A Node as a Real-Time Object

: In real-time systems, the temporal performance of the implementation is a key issue. Since this temporal performance depends not only on the functions and structure of the application software, but also on the services of the operating system, and the architecture and performance of the hardware, we argue that a node, i.e., a complete hardware software unit, is a proper unit of abstraction when building large distributed fault-tolerant real-time systems. Key words: distributed systems, real-time systems, object orientation, fault tolerance, replica determinism 1 Introduction In a hard real-time environment, the properties in the temporal domain are as important as the properties in the value domain. The object oriented design techniques will only be successful in the area of real-time systems if the design and analysis of the temporal properties of an object oriented system are supported by the object technology. The issues in the design of performance sensitive objects are yet to ..