Real-time TSpaces

TSpaces is a global communication middleware component that incorporates database features, such as transactions, persistent dates, flexible queries and XML support. TSpaces is an excellent tool for building distributed applications, since it provides an asynchronous and anonymous link between multiple clients or services. The communication link provided by TSpaces gives application builders the advantage of ignoring some of the harder aspects of multi-client synchronization, such as tracking names (and addresses) of all active clients, communication line status, and conversation status. For many applications, the loose synchronization provided by TSpaces works extremely well. However, for distributed real-time applications the loose synchronization model poses some problems. For these types of application, the TSpaces middleware must not introduce any additional unbounded latency in the interaction between network components. We describe the changes that would be needed in the current Java-based implementation of TSpaces to provide support for real-time applications, such as deterministic memory management, handling priority requests, bounded execution paths for all operations and dealing with overload situations