RTC: Language Support for Real-Time Concurrency

This paper presents language constructs for the expression of timing and concurrency requirements in distributed real-time programs. Our programming paradigm combines an object-based paradigm for the specification of shared resources, and a distributed transaction-based paradigm for the specification of application processes. Resources provide abstract views of shared system entities, such as devices and data structures. Each resource has a state and defines a set of actions that can be invoked by processes to examine or change its state. A resource also specifies scheduling constraints on the execution of its actions to ensure the maintenance of its state's consistency. Processes access resources by invoking actions and express precedence, consistency. Processes access resources by invoking actions and express precedence, consistency and timing constraints on action invocations. The implementation of our language constructs with real-time scheduling and locking for concurrency control is also described.