Research On Pluggable Protocol Mechanism Of Embedded Middleware

In distributed embedded system, the embedded devices communicate with each other to accomplish various complicated computing tasks. But the differences between embedded platforms make it difficult for developing distributed software. If using traditional method, it will involve many communication issues and increase the complexity of development. Also, it will lead to poor portability and reusability. To resolve above problems, traditional middleware CORBA was introduce into embedded system. In2008, OMG released CORBA/e V1.0and this made it possible for the distributed software to communicate in object level.However, there are rich varieties of communication media in embedded systems, not limited to Ethernet. The standard CORBA GIOP/IIOP protocols are not well-suited for those applications. It is necessary to develop the mechanism of pluggable protocols. This mechanism bases on ORB interoperability architecture and aims to abstract the same part of different transport protocols so as to plug different protocols into ORB kernel. This can adapt to different application systems.The research of the mechanism of pluggable protocols is based on ReORB, a embedded middleware developed by East-China Research Institute of Computer Technology. First, we analyze the requirement of transport protocols in ORB. Then, we design the pluggable protocol framework to plug in a variety of transport protocols flexibly. we also describe the structure of the framework and how it works in ReORB. Finally, we use IDL to define the interfaces of the framework and describe how to implement a transport plug-in based on TCP/IP.