Real-time monitoring of distributed real-time and embedded systems using Web

Abstract

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is the primary method for enabling asynchronous communication over the Web. Although AJAX is providing warranted real-time capabilities to the Web, it requires unconventional programming methods at the expense of extensive resource usage. WebSockets, which is an emerging protocol, has the potential to address many challenges with implementing asynchronous communication over the Web. There, however, has been no in-depth study that quantitatively compares AJAX and WebSockets.

This thesis therefore provides two contributions to Web development. First, it provides an experience report for adding real-time monitoring support over the Web to the Open-source Architecture of Software Instrumentation of Systems(OASIS), which is open-source real-time instrumentation middleware for distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. Secondly, it quantitatively compares using AJAX and WebSockets to stream collected instrumentation data over the Web in real-time. Results from quantitative comparison between WebSockets and AJAX show that a WebSockets server consumes 50% less network bandwidth than an AJAX server; a WebSockets client consumes memory at constant rate, not at an increasing rate; and WebSockets can send up to 215.44% more data samples when consuming the same amount network bandwidth as AJAX.