Adaptive soft real-time Java within heterogeneous environments

Traditional real-time software development methodologies require full knowledge of the resource capability of target platforms during the development stage. However, such knowledge is not always feasible within heterogeneous environments. Resource heterogeneity offers a new level challenge to real-time software portability, and changes in computing environments make application behavior even more unpredictable. As a consequence, real-time software has to probe dynamically real-time capabilities to adapt itself to different computing environments, and to respond to environment changes. We propose an approach such that the assembly of an application is postponed to execution time so that the application may be customized by gathering real-time capability information from the environments. After the application is launched, it may be finely tuned remotely by an interactive steering environment in response to changes in the computing environment. Finally, an application, the MPEG video player, is used to evaluate this approach under various computing environments.