Techniques for Optimizing CORBA Middleware for Distributed Embedded Systems

The distributed embedded systems industry is poised to leverage emerging real-time operating systems, such as Inferno, Windows CE 2.0, and Palm OS, to support mobile communication applications. Advances in off-the-shelf real-time operating systems provides an enabling framework for a wide range of mobile communication applications, such as electronic mail, Internet browsing, and network management. Ideally, these applications can be developed using standard middleware components like CORBA to improve their quality and reduce their cost and cycle time. However, stringent constraints on the available memory in embedded systems imposes a severe limit on the footprint of CORBRA middleware. This paper provides three contributions to the study and design of small footprint, real-time CORBA middleware. First we describe the optimization used to develop the protocol engine and CORBA IDL compiler provided by TAO, which is our real-time CORBA implementation.