Real-Time Middleware for Heterogeneous Network Environment
MidART is a distributed real-time middleware software package with easy-to-use programming interface for multimedia, data acquisition and message communication over UDP/IP. It allows rapid development of multi-threaded concurrent communicating applications in a network environment with Quality of Service provision. MidART Version 1.0(NT) for Windows NT 4.0 has been released. A new version of MidART has been ported onto Windows CE for handheld devices.
Background & Objective: Existing network software facilities such as the socket interface is cumbersome and difficult to use for application builders. Moreover, real-time applications need end-to-end quality of service provision. To facilitate the construction of distributed real-time applications on open off-the-shelf systems, there is a strong need to first provide easy-to-use real-time programming models and services to real-time application designers. The existing MidART fills this need for homogeneous LAN. Our ongoing work is to enhance MidART in order to support applications on heterogeneous networks including wireless networks.
Technical Discussion: MidART provides a set of real-time application specific but network transparent programming abstractions that support individual application's data acquisition, communication and QoS requirements. The focus of the middleware is to support the end-to-end application real-time data transfer requirements with a set of easy-to-use communication service programming interfaces. The key services provided by MidART are Real-Time Channel-based Reflective Memory (RT-CRM) and Selective Channels. RT-CRM is a software-based reflective memory similar to the producer/consumer model. Selective Channels allow applications to dynamically choose the remote node(s) which data is to be viewed from and sent to at run time via a set of channel start and stop protocols. (See "More Information" section for MidART publications and patents.)
Outside Collaborations: The current MidART research is in collaboration with Prof. Gerhard Fohler at the Department of Computer Engineering, Malardalen University, Sweden.
Contact: Chia Shen
Technology Area: Networks
Modification Date: September 12, 2007
