Systems architecture

About: Systems architecture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17612 publications have been published within this topic receiving 283719 citations. The topic is also known as: system architecture.

The Architecture Based Design Method

Abstract: : This paper presents the Architecture Based Design (ABD) method for designing the high-level software architecture for a product line or long-lived system. Designing an architecture for a product line or long-lived system is difficult because detailed requirements are not known in advance. The ABD method fulfills functional, quality, and business requirements at al level of abstraction that allows for the necessary variation when producing specific products. Its application relies on an understanding of the architectural mechanisms used to achieve this fulfillment. The method provides a series of steps for designing the conceptual software architecture. The conceptual software architecture provides organization of function, identification of synchronization points for independent threads of control, and allocation of function to processors. The method ends when commitments to classes, processes and operating system threads begin to be made. In addition, one output of the method is a collection of software templates that constrain the implementation of components of different types. The software templates include a description of how components interact with shared services and also include "citizenship" responsibilities for components.

Analysing dynamic change in software architectures: a case study

Abstract: The software architecture of a system is the overall structure of the system in terms of its constituent components and their interconnections Dynamic changes to the instantiated system architecture-to the components and/or interconnections-may take place while it is running In order that these changes do not violate the integrity of the system, we adopt a general model of dynamic configuration which only permits change to occur when the affected portions of the system are quiescent In this paper we investigate the ability to perform behaviour analysis on systems which conform to the change model Our analysis approach associates behavioural specifications with the components of a software architecture and analyses the behaviour of systems composed from these components We use Labelled Transition Systems to specify behaviour and Compositional Reachability Analysis to check composite system models We model the changes that can occur and use analysis to check that the architecture satisfies the properties required of it: before, during and after the change The paper uses an example to illustrate the approach and discusses some issues arising from the work

WearNET: A Distributed Multi-sensor System for Context Aware Wearables

Abstract: This paper describes a distributed, multi-sensor system architecture designed to provide a wearable computer with a wide range of complex context information. Starting from an analysis of useful high level context information we present a top down design that focuses on the peculiarities of wearable applications. Thus, our design devotes particular attention to sensor placement, system partitioning as well as resource requirements given by the power consumption, computational intensity and communication overhead. We describe an implementation of our architecture and initial experimental results obtained with the system.

The Global Sensor Networks middleware for efficient and flexible deployment and interconnection of sensor networks

Abstract: The lack of standardization and the continuous inflow of novel sensor network technologies have made their deployment the main factor of manpower consumption, considerably complicate the interconnection of heterogeneous sensor networks, and make portable application development a challenging and time-consuming task. To address these problems we propose our Global Sensor Networks middleware which supports the rapid and simple deployment of a wide range of sensor network technologies, facilitates the flexible integration and discovery of sensor networks and sensor data, enables fast deployment and addition of new platforms, provides distributed querying, filtering, and combination of sensor data, and supports the dynamic adaption of the system configuration during operation. GSN offers virtual sensors as a simple and powerful abstraction which enables the user to declaratively specify XML-based deployment descriptors in combination with the possibility to integrate sensor network data through plain SQL queries over local and remote sensor data sources. The paper describes GSN's conceptual model and system architecture, and demonstrates the efficiency of the implementation through experiments with typical high-load application profiles. The GSN implementation is available from http://globalsn.sourceforge.net/.