MEAD: support for Real-Time Fault-Tolerant CORBA

The OMG's Real-Time CORBA (RT-CORBA) and Fault-Tolerant CORBA (FT-CORBA) specifications make it possible for today's CORBA implementations to exhibit either real-time or fault tolerance in isolation. While real-time requires a priori knowledge of the system's temporal operation, fault tolerance necessarily deals with faults that occur unexpectedly, and with possibly unpredictable fault recovery times. The MEAD (Middleware for Embedded Adaptive Dependability) system attempts to identify and to reconcile the conflicts between real-time and fault tolerance, in a resource-aware manner, for distributed CORBA applications. MEAD supports transparent yet tunable fault tolerance in real-time, proactive dependability, resource-aware system adaptation to crash, communication and timing faults with bounded fault detection and fault recovery. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.