A distributed real-time operating system built with aspect-oriented programming for distributed embedded control systems

Abstract

The paper presents a method to build a distributed real-time operating system for distributed embedded control systems using aspect-oriented programming. We define aspects to weave distributed computing mechanisms to an existing real-time operating system. By using the aspects, we can build a distributed operating system without modifying the original source code. This improves the maintainability of the source code of a real-time operating system family. We have applied the aspects to an OSEK OS and have got a distributed operating system that provides location-transparent system calls for task management and inter-task synchronization. The evaluation results show that the overhead of aspect-oriented programming is practically small enough.