Architecture and implementation of an embedded wormhole

Recent advances in wireless communication technology have opened the way for mobile services and applications. This paper describes ongoing work in the context of the HIDENETS project, which aims at the development of end-to-end resilience solutions for distributed applications and mobility-aware services in ubiquitous communication scenarios. In HIDENETS we assume the use of off-the-shelf components (COTS) and wireless communication links, which are inherently unreliable and uncertain, therefore making it difficult to secure dependability properties. The solutions under development are based on a hybrid system architecture, which considers the existence of a subsystem with better properties than the rest of the system: a wormhole. A wormhole provides specialized timeliness and trustworthiness services that may be used to construct more dependable and resilient applications. We are currently developing an embedded implementation of a wormhole, which we describe and discuss in this paper. In particular, we focus on the internal architecture of the wormhole, on the services it provides and on some of the challenges that we have faced during development. © 2007 IEEE.