CORBA based core middleware architecture supporting seamless interoperability between standard home network middlewares

The current paper presents a CORBA based core middleware architecture for supporting seamless interoperability in an IEEE1394-based home network. To support CORBA on top of an IEEE139-based home network, a CORBA programming platform is designed and implemented without any loss of the real-time properties of the IEEE1394 protocol. To customize the real-time CORBA properties using the IEEE1394 protocol, first, a specially designed device driver for the IEEE1394 adaptor is developed based on an RT-Linux kernel. On top of the device driver, an IEEE1394 ORB is also designed and implemented to support CORBA. The proposed ORB consists of two components. One is the IEEE1394 asynchronous ORB according to the GIOP specification of CORBA to support interoperability with other ORBS, such as IIOP, and the other is the IEEE1394 isochronous ORB to retain the real-time properties of the IEEE1394 protocol. The performance of the proposed CORBA based core middleware platform is verified based on a prototype home network test-bed.