ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, the enabling concepts behind real-time systems were introduced. In this chapter, the concepts that extend a real-time system to a distributed real-time system (DRTS) are introduced.
Classically, a DRTS is a collection of several real-time subsystems interconnected using a shared data network. Each subsystem, in the simplest case, could be a processing element comprising a processor and memory. The entire DRTS may be viewed as a loosely coupled distributed system with definite response time, that is, real-time functionality. Architectural issues of a DRTS mostly focus on the interconnection of the constituent subsystems and also the ways the functionalities of a DRTS are governed. First, the interconnection topologies are visited.
