Predictable deployment in component-based enterprise distributed real-time and embedded systems

Component-based middleware, such as the Lightweight CORBA Component Model, are increasingly used to implement large-scale distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. In addition to supporting the quality of service (QoS) requirements of individual DRE systems, component technologies must also support bounded latencies when effecting deployment changes to DRE systems in response to changing environmental conditions and operational requirements. This paper makes three contributions to the study of predictable deployment latencies in DRE systems. First, we describe OMG's Deployment and Configuration (D&C) specification for component-based systems and discuss how conventional implementations of this standard can significantly degrade deployment latencies. Second, we describe architectural changes and performance optimizations implemented within the Locality-Enhanced Deployment and Configuration Engine (LE-DAnCE) implementation of the D&C specification. Finally, we analyze the performance of LE-DAnCE in the context of component deployments on 10 nodes for a representative DRE system consisting of 1,000 components. Our results show LE-DAnCE's optimizations provide a bounded deployment latency of less than 2 seconds with 2 percent jitter.