Providing real-time support through component object model

While there has been substantial work on real-time CORBA-to offer real-time support in a distributed heterogeneous environment with standard real-time middle-ware, comparatively less work has been done to investigate support for real-time applications in COM, the direct competitor of CORBA. In this paper, we examine the COM technology and explore the possibility of providi ng real-time support in COM. We argue that real-time COM should provide a p olicy specification interface between the application and the underlying (r eal-time) operating systems that is as declarative as possible, and we conc lude that COM can be extended to provide various real-time support services through this interface. We shall discuss an experimental prototype targete d for real applications along the Line of our proposal. (C) 1999 Elsevier S cience B.V. All rights reserved.