Development of Adaptive and Reflective Middleware

A report describes Phase II of the Adaptive and Reflective Middleware Systems (ARMS) program, which was focused on developing an adaptive and reflective network Quality-of-Service (QoS) infrastructure for the Total Ship Computing Environment (TSCE). Conceived for the next generation of Navy surface ships, the TSCE is associated with a computing architecture characterized by modularity, extensibility, scalability, and amenability to upgrading of all software and hardware systems. A major feature of the ARMS approach is the use of a bandwidth broker that provides admission control and leverages differentiated-services and class-of-service functionalities of high end routers and switches in order to guarantee end-to-end QoS in a heterogeneous computing environment. Building upon the Phase I product, the Phase II development (1) provides continued assurance of network QoS for mission- critical tasks in the presence of single mode faults and such catastrophic faults as the loss of an entire data center, and (2) improves timely adaptation to network performance using probes and instrumentation to measure delay. The ARMS development also raises the level of abstraction in the use of model-driven development software tools for configuring, deploying, and achieving QoS in distributed real-time embedded systems.