Communication Middleware Research Articles

Measuring performance of middleware technologies for medical systems

After decades of design, development and usage of distributed application technologies, there are numerous communication middleware architectures and implementations in the market that have reached a considerable maturity level. A large number of them are open source initiatives that have shown efficiency and good performance in a broad range of domains, from banking to gaming. These are low cost solutions, easily programmable and of high interest to be explored in areas such as cyber-physical medical systems that have special requirements for safety, availability, communication latency, real-time operation, and fault tolerance. This paper analyzes the suitability of two open source communication middleware technologies, Ice (Internet Communication Engine) and AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), as software elements suitable for developing audio transmission and reception systems for low cost medical applications. The paper simulates an audio application with both technologies, made of a server (nurse central) that receives and processes audio media from several clients (patients); communication can be triggered concurrent from multiple patients and in both directions. Stress tests with high load conditions are simulated in the experiments to show the behavior of both technologies mainly with respect to their stability and overhead.

Flexible and timely on-line integration of medical services using iLand middleware

Modern medical systems are intensive in the use of distribution technology in medical services. Communication among professionals and patients is enabled to exchange patient information, and for on-line monitoring of health conditions. A miriad of specialized middleware solutions that have appeared in this domain, typically focus on providing more and more patient-data processing services over basic communication backbones (e.g., from pure socket communication to more sophisticated interaction models). Paradigms such as service oriented architectures and decoupled communication middleware support the development of emerging medical systems based on the composition of existing (posibly remote) services into a new application. This adjusts to the phylosophy of systems of systems (SoS) development. In a cyber-physical medical domain, service based applications require support for this composition in a way that a new application is created (or simply modified) in a timely fashion. iLand middleware supports this phylosophy, enabling both off-line and run-time reconfiguration of distributed service based applications. It provides timely operation, controlled communication delays, and a decoupled interaction model for stateless services. iLand has been used in medical applications for remote patient monitoring and in surveillance domains for remote real-time video transmission. This paper presents the systems that iLand has enabled in the medical domain, mainly based on remote patient monitoring. These iLand-based systems have shown to be flexible and capable of undergoing timely service reconfigurations.

Aproximación Basada en UML para el Diseño y Codificación Automática de Plataformas Robóticas Manipuladoras

Today, robotics manipulator is a crucial discipline in modern production industrial facilities and in a near future; it will also be decisive in the human quotidian society. Consequently, currently there is a growing demand of applications with arm-based robots with requirements such as: reutilization, flexibility and adaptability. Unfortunately, there is a lack of standardization of hardware and software platforms, so the satisfaction of these requirements is too difficult. In this sense, there is a necessity of a methodology that guides along application design, implementation as well as the execution of the software systems. This work, explores the advantages of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) for the design and development of applications performed by manipulator robots. In fact, an UML based approach is proposed that supports the design of robotic tasks and an automatic code generation for the most spread robotic communication Middlewares has been also developed. More specifically, the target code generation for OROCOS and ROS communication Middlewares has been detailed. Finally, two case studies have been presented one for industrial field and the other for service sector. The former runs on OROCOS and the latter on ROS.

Performances Analysis of a SCADA Architecture for Industrial Processes

SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems are used to monitor and control various industrial processes, and have been continuously developed in order to incorporate the new technologies from software development and field busses areas. The middleware communication has the most relevant role in the development of such complex distributed systems as SCADA systems. These systems are very complex and must be reliable and predictable. Furthermore, their performance capabilities are very important. This paper presents a performance analysis of a SCADA system developed for Windows platform, including Windows Compact Embedded. The analysis is focused on the performance difference between computing systems based on Windows desktop and Windows CE operating systems. The utilization of the Windows CE is useful on the application with real-time requirements that cannot be achieved by the Windows desktop. Testing the application and analyzing the results led to the validation of the proposed SCADA system.

Kassandra : A framework for distributed simulation of heterogeneous cooperating objects

Abstract To address the heterogeneity and scalability issues of simulating Cooperating Objects (COs) systems, we propose Kassandra , a conceptual framework for enabling distributed COs simulation by integrating existing simulation tools. Moreover, Kassandra exploits the communication middleware used by real-world COs as underlying communication mechanism for integrating Kassandra -enabled simulation tools. In this way, real-world COs can be included with simulated objects in a seamless way to perform more accurate system performance evaluation. Moreover, such a hardware-in-the-loop approach is not limited to pre-deployment performance analysis, and can offer possibilities to analyse performance at different phases of CO applications. The concept of Kassandra has been carried out in the EU PLANET project. In this paper, we introduce the Kassandra framework components and show their interactions at different phases for node deployments in PLANET use cases. The result demonstrates the applicability of Kassandra to facilitate the development of CO applications.

Adjusting middleware knobs to assess scalability limits of distributed cyber-physical systems

The traditional development paradigm for time-sensitive distributed systems (and even more for real-time domains) has typically relied on unflexible low-level schemes; these have been based on (also) low-level programming of improved medium access control protocols to obtain deterministic network schedules. Such technique does not scale well in the context of cyber-physical systems (CPS), which have a complexity of several orders of magnitude higher. In this paper, we explore the actual trend of cyber-physical systems (CPS) that are progressively integrated with Internet technologies to fulfill their requirements of being highly connected systems. The integration pillar is the communication middleware; however, communication middleware technologies are prone to introducing delays at different levels, increasing the potential uncertainty of the system execution. Therefore, individual analysis of middleware technologies is needed to assess the bounds on the type and scale of CPS that they can support. We analyse the behavior of a specific a middleware technology and its cost for handling the interaction of distributed nodes in the context of cyber-physical systems. We propose the design of a reliable middleware infrastructure for distributed embedded systems integrated in a CPS environment. Our approach considers time requirements specified by the system nodes or units, and fine tunes a few specific parameters of the middleware that we refer to as knobs. We validate our solution implementation in a experimental setting and show the system scale that can be supported in a stable way.

Hierarchical Task Network planning with common-sense reasoning for multiple-people behaviour analysis

Safety on public transport is a major concern for the relevant authorities. We address this issue by proposing an automated surveillance platform which combines data from video, infrared and pressure sensors. Data homogenisation and integration is achieved by a distributed architecture based on communication middleware that resolves interconnection issues, thereby enabling data modelling. A common-sense knowledge base models and encodes knowledge about public-transport platforms and the actions and activities of passengers. Trajectory data from passengers is modelled as a time-series of human activities. Common-sense knowledge and rules are then applied to detect inconsistencies or errors in the data interpretation. Lastly, the rationality that characterises human behaviour is also captured here through a bottom-up Hierarchical Task Network planner that, along with common-sense, corrects misinterpretations to explain passenger behaviour. The system is validated using a simulated bus saloon scenario as a case-study. Eighteen video sequences were recorded with up to six passengers. Four metrics were used to evaluate performance. The system, with an accuracy greater than 90% for each of the four metrics, was found to outperform a rule-base system and a system containing planning alone.

CMSNS: a communication middleware for social networking and networked multimedia systems

In this paper, we propose a communication middleware for social networking services (CMSNS) in order to reduce the development effort and to support high accessibility to remote social content such as text, image, and video. The main role of CMSNS is to provide a developer with simple application programming interfaces (APIs) and configuration options related to communication among users. With CMSNS, a developer can easily build communication-related functions which are commonly required in SNS and networked multimedia systems such as the management of communication architecture, user registration and authentication, and synchronous / asynchronous sharing of content among users. In addition to the simple development model, CMSNS enables a server to dynamically adjust the amount of SNS content to be downloaded at a client according to current network conditions. With this scheme, a user can access as much content as possible within an acceptable delay, which enhances the accessibility to remote content.

An adaptive self-managing platform for cabin management systems

In the cabin domain, the degree of changeability is an important commercial parameter. This includes customization before initial aircraft delivery as well as in-service cabin rearrangements and upgrades. This requires a highly flexible cabin management system (CMS). Today`s CMSs face this challenge with configurable system architectures offering a vast change domain, however, the change process itself is very time consuming and error-prone. To overcome this issue our approach of an Adaptive Platform will make manual configuration widely dispensable. Thereby adaptivity means that all components of the platform’s software architecture are able to adapt to any CMS instance nearly without human intervention. Most of the system knowledge needed for this purpose, e.g., topology or communication requirements, is autonomously obtained by discovery mechanisms. The adaptive software architecture contains the following: (1) a data-centric communication middleware, (2) management services clearly separated from the application and (3) plug and play mechanisms for the integration of new application software and peripheral devices. Focus of this paper is the management service which abstracts faulty resources and coordinates global system behaviour w.r.t. aircraft’s state. As a proof of concept, an adaptive CMS demonstration system was realized. We think that the proposed architecture will increase the flexibility within the lifecycle of a CMS substantially. In addition, the contained management services raise the application’s abstraction level by disburden it from any management tasks. Further work on this topic may cover evaluation of the adaptive approach for more safety critical avionic systems or incorporate certification aspects such as automated documentation and testing.

Analyzing point-to-point DDS communication over desktop virtualization software

Virtualization technologies introduce additional uncertainty and overhead for distributed applications, that may challenge their timeliness. The additional software abstraction layers of the virtualization software offer powerful parallel execution environments but, at the same time, reduce the effective performance as additional software layers are introduced. This requires some fine tuning of, among others, the communication middleware software. The different resource management mechanisms of the middleware may collide with the specific algorithms replicated by the underlying virtualization software. The present work characterises the set of steps of a publish-subscribe communication middleware in a distributed system, enhancing it to suit the communication scheme of virtualized remote nodes. The potential communication steps are identified, and the overhead introduced by the execution over the virtualization software is provided by means of a data communication rate metric; a set of benchmark tests are presented that empirically evaluate the overhead and stability of the most widely used publish-subscribe (P/S) middleware named DDS (Data Distribution System for real-time systems). A general purpose cloud computing virtual machine monitor is utilized to identify the side effects and the drawbacks of the general virtualization technology. Results are obtained on a setting with two different DDS implementations over a general purpose virtualization software, together with a discussion about the potential drawbacks of the main communication operations.

A modular CPS architecture design based on ROS and Docker

In this paper a modular generic architecture for cyber-physical systems based on free open software components is presented. The architecture is implemented over inexpensive components frequently found in information and communication technology contexts. More specifically, the robot operating system middleware abstracts communication among multiple networked modules, whereas the Docker lightweight virtualization container is proposed to wrap up software modules. Focus is on mobile robotics in production systems and industrial automation environments. Actually, an automated guided vehicle problem is demonstrated by means of a proof of concept aimed at industrial automation applications illustrating the potential of the proposed architecture and its implementation, built with low cost hardware modules.

Case Study on Message Races in Data Distribution Service Programs

Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a dependable communication middleware architecture to provide real-time interoperable data exchanges for airborne software. It is important to efficiently detect message races for debugging DDS programs, because it is the most serious type of software faults. Because message races in DDS cause unpredictable results, they must be detected for debugging. However, there has been no report yet on the existence and its confirmation of unintended message races in DDS programs. This paper empirically presents fault cases how it lead to message races on the different order of events. In order to prove it, we show four cases of message races considering the order of two write events and the quality of service (QoS), which lead to nondeterministic results.

JACK: an asynchronous communication kernel library for iterative algorithms

This article presents a new communication library developed to ease the implementation of both asynchronous and synchronous iterative methods. A mathematical and algorithmic framework about fixed-point methods is described to introduce this class of parallel iterative algorithms, although this library can be used for a larger class of parallel algorithms. After an overview of the main features, we describe detailed implementation aspects arising from the asynchronous context. While the library is mainly based on top of Message Passing Interface library, it has been designed to be easily extended to other types of communication middleware. Finally, some numerical experiments validate this new library, used for implementing both a classical parallel scheme and a sub-structuring approach of the Jacobi iterative method.

균등 부하분산과 응답 정확도 향상을 위한 처리 이전 기법

Migrim(Migration enhanced Grid Middleware) is a communication middleware between embedded devices and multiple servers. In traditional client-server communication, users' requests are sent to and processed by a designated server even though the server may suffer from a heavy load. In addition, the designated server may not have proper information to process the user's request correctly. Proposed connection migration mechanism and transaction migration mechanism are designed to improve the performance and accuracy of request processing. The connection migration is a procedure for delegating a connection to another server, which results in a well-distributed balancing of load among the servers. The transaction migration is a procedure for delegating a transaction to another server, and improves the accuracy of response.

A seamless ubiquitous emergency medical service for crisis situations

In crisis situations, a seamless ubiquitous communication is necessary to provide emergency medical service to save people's lives. An excellent prehospital emergency medicine provides immediate medical care to increase the survival rate of patients. On their way to the hospital, ambulance personnel must transmit real-time and uninterrupted patient information to the hospital to apprise the physician of the situation and provide options to the ambulance personnel. In emergency and crisis situations, many communication channels can be unserviceable because of damage to equipment or loss of power. Thus, data transmission over wireless communication to achieve uninterrupted network services is a major obstacle. This study proposes a mobile middleware for cognitive radio (CR) for improving the wireless communication link. CRs can sense their operating environment and optimize the spectrum usage so that the mobile middleware can integrate the existing wireless communication systems with a seamless communication service in heterogeneous network environments. Eventually, the proposed seamless mobile communication middleware was ported into an embedded system, which is compatible with the actual network environment without the need for changing the original system architecture.

Research of the Communication Middleware of the Yacht Supervision Management System Based on DDS

The communication middleware of the yacht supervision management system (YSM) which is based on the DDS is the communication management software of the yacht supervision center system and the ship monitoring system. In order to ensure the high efficiency and high reliability of communication middleware, the paper for the first time introduced DDS communication framework to the yacht supervision system in the process of software design and implementation, and designed and implemented more flexible and reliable communication management interface for the DDS communication framework. Through practical test, each performance index of DDS communication middleware software of the yacht supervision management system has reached the design requirements.

フィジカル・システムと連動した生産設備シミュレーション（設備シミュレーションを構築するためのコンポーネント標準化の提案）

This paper discusses the effectiveness of manufacturing facility simulation linked with physical systems on value chain activities. The activities on manufacturing preparation and implementation processes of manufacturing systems have been improved by manufacturing facility simulation. This method originates from research on the concept of virtual manufacturing environment in the early 1990s. The equipment or facility simulation layer corresponding with the standard hierarchy model of enterprise and control integration is defined. Facility and control model utilized for whole facility lifecycle and its configuration are proposed as a standardization candidate of the reference model. The model consists of digital data of many components including mechanical and control properties like 3D data of mechanism, kinematics, axis, joint, sensor signal and actuator signal. The model should be the standard because the property information of components is only provided by parts suppliers. The facility simulation is linked with both physical controllers and their simulators by standard communication middleware connecting various communication protocols of Real-time Ethernet and fieldbus. After the detail system configuration is described, the applied case studies of improving engineering chain activities in automobile manufacturing are explained. The case studies indicate these systems are efficient to shorten the development period of flexible manufacturing facilities including robots and fixture jigs and to reduce the development cost.

오픈 소스 하드웨어를 이용한 임베디드 기반의 분산형 RFID 게이트웨이의 설계

In this paper, we configure a Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) gateway using an arduino and raspberry pi which are recent issues with a representative open source hardware. RFID technology is emerging as a key technology in a variety of environments as a technique to automatically identify objects using a radio frequency signal. In this paper, we propose a distributed RFID gateway for providing various communication methods and processing a large amount of RFID tag information efficiently, and to increase the scalability and middleware communication efficiency of the RFID reader. Existing RFID middleware systems have the problems that they should adhere the web service for interworking with a reader and the communication standard. Therefore, in this paper, we comprise our RFID gate to satisfy not only the serial communication configuration but also various digital signal processing standard so that it increases the communication efficiency of the middleware system.

Improving the Architecture of Communication Middleware for Social Networking Services

We propose an improved version of our communication middleware for social networking services (CMSNS) designed to support the rapid development of a social networking service (SNS) application through simple application programming interfaces (APIs) and configuration options related to communication among users. With CMSNS, a developer can easily build the communication-related functions that are commonly required for SNS applications, including communication architecture management, user registration and authentication, event transmission, and SNS messages with friends. We improved the internal architecture of the proposed CMSNS to provide platform independence, save event size, use an event queue to efficiently process events, and adopt a model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern to separate the internal information from multiple event controller modules.

Fast Data Processing for Large-Scale SOA and Event-Based Systems

The deluge of intelligent objects that are providing continuous access to data and services on one hand and the demand of developers and consumers to handle these data on the other hand require us to think about new communication paradigms and middleware. In hyper-scale systems, such as in the Internet of Things, large scale sensor networks or even mobile networks, one emerging requirement is to process, procure, and provide information with almost zero latency. This work is introducing new concepts for a middleware to enable fast communication by limiting information flow with filtering concepts using policy obligations and combining data processing techniques adopted from complex event processing.