A framework for adaptive real-time applications: the declarative real-time OSGi component model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a declarative real-time component model for OSGi, enabling standard management, dynamic adaptation, and real-time guarantees, demonstrated through a prototype with promising performance.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive declarative framework for real-time support in OSGi, including contract description, management interface, and runtime control.

Findings

Framework maintains real-time guarantees during runtime changes

Prototype demonstrates good real-time performance

Supports dynamic reconfiguration without contract impairment

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more applications require OSGi to have some form of real-time support, which is currently very limited. The resulting closed-system solutions lack of a standard management scheme which forbids standard, system-wide policies for real-time system's deployment, adaptation, and reconfiguration. In order to tackle this problem, this paper proposes a declarative real-time component model. In this model, the distinguishing real-time contract of each component is declaratively described, and a general component real-time management interface is designed. They are used to maintain an accurate view of existing real-time components' promised contracts. A real-time component runtime service is designed to control the whole lifecycle of the components. By using global information and general control interface, it can adjust the system continue to operate without impairing the deployed components' real-time contracts in the face of run-time changes. This system allows itself to be easily extended with other constraint resolving policies to fit different context. The prototype has been tested into a simulated control system. The result shows this framework can provide good real time performance while still provides real-time component dynamicity support as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive solution providing explicit real-time support from design to execution in OSGi framework.