Building Light Weight CORBA Based Middleware for the CAN Bus Systems

The software components of embedded control systems get extremely complex as they are designed into distributed systems consisting of a large number of inexpensive microcontrollers interconnected by low-bandwidth real-time networks such as the controller area network (CAN). While recently emerging middleware technologies such as CORBA and DCOM address the complexity of distributed programming, they cannot be directly applied to distributed control system design due to their excessive resource demand and inadequate communication models. In this paper, we propose a CORBA -based middleware design for CANbased distributed embedded control systems. Our design goal is to minimize its resource need and make it support group communication without losing the IDL (interface definition language) level compliance to the OMG standards. To achieve this, we develop a transport protocol on the CAN and a group communication scheme based on the well-known publisher/subscriber model. The protocol effectively realizes subject-based addressing and supports anonymous publisher/subscriber communication. We also customize the method invocation and message passing protocol, referred to as the general inter-ORB protocol (GIOP), of CORBA so that CORBA method invocations are efficiently serviced on a low-bandwidth network such as the CAN. This customization includes packed data encoding and variable -length integer encoding for compact representation of IDL data types. We have implemented our CORBA -based middleware on the mArx real-time operating system we have developed at Seoul National University. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that it is feasible to use CORBA in developing distributed embedded control systems possessing severe resource limitations. Our design clearly demonstrates that it is feas ible to use a CORBA -based middleware in developing distributed embedded systems on real-time networks possessing severe resource limitations.