ROAFTS: A CORBA-Based Real-Time Fault Tolerance Support Middleware

Middleware implementation of various critical services, required by large-scale and complex real-time applications on top of COTS operating systems, has the tremendous advantage of reducing the complexity of the design and implementation by separating the concerns of the application designer for the application functionality from the concerns for application-independent system issues. In addition, such a middleware must preferably be structured in an object-oriented fashion owing to the modularity and natural abstraction benefits objectorientation brings in. This paper presents the results of a research effort on the development of the Real-time Object-oriented Adaptive Fault Tolerance Support (ROAFTS) middleware on top of a COTS operating systems, Solaris, and a COTS CORBA-complaint ORB, Orbix. The supported real-time application consists of a network of Time-triggered Message-triggered Objects (TMO's), the TMO being a major extension of a conventional object for use in real-time applications.