Design patterns for releasing applications in C++ implementations of JTRS software communications architecture

The software communications architecture (SCA), which has been adopted as an SDR (software defined radio) Forum standard, provides a framework that successfully exploits common design patterns of distributed, real-time, and object-oriented embedded systems software. We have fully implemented the SCA v2.2 in C++. During this implementation process, we have encountered the lack of a suitable design pattern for releasing the SCA applications. Unfortunately, design patterns for releasing objects have been neither extensively addressed nor well investigated as opposed to creational design patterns. This is largely due to the fact that such releasing design patterns are highly dependent on programming languages. In this paper, we investigate three viable design patterns for releasing the SCA applications in C++ and discuss their pros and cons. In addition, we select the most portable and thus most reusable pattern, which we name Vulture design pattern, among those alternatives and detail our specific implementation