Design and performance of a CAN-based connection-oriented protocol for Real-Time CORBA

The Real-Time CORBA and minimumCORBA specifications are important steps towards defining standard-based middleware which can satisfy real-time requirements in an embedded system. To reach a broad acceptance in the real-time and embedded community, these specifications have to facilitate the utilization of traditional real-time networks for embedded systems. The Controller Area Network (CAN) is one of the most important networks in the field of real-time embedded systems. Consequently, this paper presents a CAN-based connection-oriented communication model and its integration into Real-Time CORBA. In order to make efficient use of the advantages of CAN, we present a new inter-ORB protocol, which uses smaller message headers for CAN and maps the CAN priorities to bands of CORBA priorities. We also present design and implementation details and evaluate the performance of the new inter-ORB protocol.