Experimental Research and Future Approach on Evaluating Service‐Oriented Architecture (SOA) Challenges in a Hard Real‐Time Combat System Environment

As the integration and interoperability demands among heterogeneous systems increase, Service‐Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have provided a potential technical solution to integrate these complex systems within an enterprise framework. This paper presents experimental results and future approaches to assess the employment of an SOA within a hard real‐time (stringent time constraints), deterministic (maximum predictability) combat system (CS). For these systems with hard real‐time requirements, web services have generally not demonstrated the necessary and sufficient characteristics to satisfy these stringent needs. Specifically, this paper provides a characterization of hard real‐time, deterministic systems; results from a recent small‐scale experiment to assess various SOA products in this demanding architecture; and the future direction to research real‐time applications in a representative operational environment. Experimental results to date indicate that emerging real‐time technologies are contributing to improved performance and better predictability within the internal processing latencies of web service applications. This preliminary research focuses on a simplistic computing architecture, but it provides a good baseline for more detailed experimentation using the actual systems. If successful, this research could lead down a path to increase synergy and consolidate computing infrastructures by supporting multiple user domains with the potential of reducing cost for both acquisition and lifecycle support.