FTTlet based distributed system architecture

In this paper an architecture of a distributed embedded system, that offers the advantages of the Java programming model and the flexibility and timeliness of the Flexible Time-Triggered (FTT) paradigm, is presented. The architecture builds on previous work by the authors in which a simple mechanism to dispatch tasks and messages was proposed for CAN-based distributed systems. In order to overcome the innate limitations of the under-specified scheduler built into Java Virtual Machines (JVM) this proposal disables it and makes use of the centralized scheduler of the FTT approach. This way, one of the main constraints in using Java in distributed embedded systems is eliminated. Due to the use of an underlying kernel that isolates the JVM from the network and the FTT mechanism, any JVM implementation with real-time guarantees doesn’t need significant changes in order to be integrated in this architecture. Also a framework that allows the complete system simulation is discussed.