Infrastructure for Studying Infrastructure

Self-adaptation in embedded self-organizing real-time systems pose stringent expectations on the performance of their system architecture. The flexibility required for self-adaptation argues for multiplicity or variability of processes, whereas the embedded real-time aspects argue for very fast and low power processes. These two expectations are in direct opposition to each other, and good engineering practice implies careful study of the implications of the trade-offs. In this paper, we show how to use our Wrapping approach to integration infrastructure as a base to study proposed infrastructure choices for these applications, and argue that the Wrappings approach is ideally suited to this endeavor, since it makes no a priori assumptions about the infrastructure (or about itself, as we shall explain), and therefore allows any such questions to be studied. To do so, we provide enough details about the Wrapping approach to support our claims, and show how it would be applied to some popular infrastructures.