University of Cantabria

Many cyber-physical systems in the avionics domain are mission- or safety-critical systems. In this context, standard distribution middleware has recently emerged as a potential solution to interconnect heterogeneous partitioned systems, as it would bring important benefits throughout the software development process. A remaining challenge, however, is reducing the complexity associated with current distribution middleware standards which leads to prohibitive certification costs.

Partitioning is a widespread technique that enables the execution of mixed-criticality applications in the same hardware platform. New challenges for the next generation of partitioned systems include the use of multiprocessor architectures and distribution standards in order to open up this technique to a heterogeneous set of emerging scenarios (e.g., cyber-physical systems).

Modern complex embedded systems are evolving into mixed-criticality systems in order to satisfy a wide set of non-functional requirements such as security, cost, weight, timing or power consumption. Partitioning is an enabling technology for this purpose, as it provides an environment with strong temporal and spatial isolation which allows the integration of applications with different requirements into a common hardware platform.

The Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard defines a data-centric distribution middleware that supports the development of distributed real-time systems. To this end, the standard includes a wide set of configurable parameters to provide different degrees of Quality of Service (QoS). This paper presents an analysis of these QoS parameters when DDS is used to build reactive applications normally designed under an event-driven paradigm, and shows how to represent them using the real-time end-to-end flow model defined by the MARTE standard.