Real-time event channel performance on a submarine communications network

This project evaluated the real-time event channel of the TAO software when running under the Sun Solaris 8 operating system. We modeled the communications channel among the RTS, NAV, and SONR units taken from the shipboard network architecture design for Virginia-class submarines. We established a baseline set of performance measurements for throughput, latency and jitter, communicating over UDP, TCP, and CORBA, running over Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and ATM OC3. Then we evaluated the performance of the CORBA event channel in the NAV data distribution scenario, including tests of the real-time event channel and the real-time features of Solaris 8. We conducted hundreds of simulations under a variety of conditions, including process-to-process communication on one machine, process-to-process with network loopback, machine-to-machine over the three networks, with and without highly loaded CPUs, with and without additional network traffic, and with and without utilizing the real-time event channel. Our most significant results were the documentation of CORBA overhead, the cost of CORBA data marshaling, and the throughput and latency measurements, using both loaded and unloaded CPUs, over Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and ATM OC3 networks.