Building Component Based Software Connectors for Communication Middleware in Distributed Embedded Systems

Interaction in distributed component based software-architectures can become a rather complex and error prone issue. As it is good practice to keep application concerns separated from infrastructural ones, component based applications typically rely on communication middleware to cope with matters of distribution and heterogeneity. Unfortunately, generic middleware tends to be monolithic, heavyweight software, which is unacceptable in resource constrained embedded systems. Communication middleware for distributed embedded systems has to be custom tailored to the application’s interaction needs and therefore shall be as lightweight as possible. By applying the component paradigm to the communication middleware, a practical methodology can be defined, that allows the middleware’s automatic generation from the application’s architectural models and structural designs of explicit component connectors with a well defined set of prefabricated basic building blocks—so called communication primitives. This paper contributes by specifying the most common structural designs for explicit connectors within the automotive domain and thereby, in addition identifies a set of classes of automotive communication primitives. Thus this paper provides the sound foundation for automatic, model driven middleware synthesis by specifying all necessary basic modules.Copyright © 2007 by ASME