AN HETEROGENEOUS AND DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURE BASED ON A REFLECTIVE MEMORY INTERCONNECTION NETWORK

Complex control system architectures are usually characterized by the heterogeneity and the distribution of their technological components. Besides, system engineers have at their disposal a number of technological alternatives to implement any of the different parts of a distributed application. For those reasons, the communication among the distributed components of a system often becomes an issue to address. In this paper we report a technique to solve this problem which is based on the use of reflective memory devices without any additional software requirement, and that can satisfy hard throughput requirements. We describe the implementation of a testbed for testing the proposed communication technique. We finally apply the results to a real-time data acquisition system characterized by a very heterogeneous architecture, whose components have been pushed to the limits of their performance and capacity.