Design of a Real-Time CORBA Event Service Customised for the CAN Bus

Real-Time Corba and minimumCORBA are the founda- tions many so called distributed real-time embedded (DRE) systems are built upon. These specifications describe mid- dleware suitable for connecting different parts of a complex embedded system. Efficient group based communication in such a system can be achieved by using the Event Service. This article focuses on the design of such a service comply- ing to the OMG Event Service standard. It is optimised for the CAN bus, a widely used interconnect, where real-time characteristics are a requirement. A new protocol for the efficient distribution of events in a CAN-based distributed control system is presented, a protocol which is tailored to the CAN bus and produces very low overhead by utilising CAN-specific features.