On real-time transactions

Abstract

Next generation real-time systems will require greater flexibility and predictability than is commonly found in today's systems. These future systems include the space station, integrated vision/robotics/AI systems, collections of humans/robots coordinating to achieve common objectives (usually in hazardous environments such as undersea exploration or chemical plants), and various command and control applications. The complexity of such systems due to timing constraints, concurrency, and distribution is high. It is accepted that the synchronization, failure atomicity, and permanence properties of transactions aid in the development of distributed systems. However, little work has been done in exploiting transactions in a real-time context. We have been attempting to categorize real-time data into classes depending on their time, synchronization, atomicity, and permanence properties. Then, using the semantics of the data and the applications, we are developing special, tailored, real-time transactions that only supply the minimal properties necessary for that class. This reduces the system overhead in supporting access to various types of data. The eventual goal is to verify that timing requirements can be met.