A Real-time Service Oriented Infrastructure

Both real-time systems and virtualization have been important research topics for quite some time now. Having competing goals, research on the correlation of these topics has started only recently. This chapter overviews recent results in the research literature on virtualized large-scale systems and soft real-time systems. These concepts constitute the fundamental background over which the execution environment of any large-scale service-oriented real-time architecture for highly interactive, distributed, and virtualized applications will be built in the future. While many aspects covered in this chapter have already been adopted in commercial products, others are still under intensive investigation in research labs all over the world.