Embedded Elvin

Exhibitor: Toby Smith

Supervisor: Peter Sutton

Research Group: Embedded Systems

Industry Sector: Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

Elvin is a content-based routing protocol developed by the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC). Traditional networking technologies are based primarily on one-to-one directed communication models such as those provided by TCP. In contrast, Elvin is a communications protocol wherein messages are delivered to potentially many consumers based solely the content of the message. Content-based routing, and Elvin in particular, is especially suited to application in large scale distributed systems, overcoming problems with device naming and resource discovery.

There have been a number of attempts to introduce Elvin to the embedded arena. However, these have generally been either application specific implementations or required the intervention of a desktop PC. The current Elvin client libraries are large and complex pieces of software, unsuitable for usage in an embedded device. In order to ease the introduction of Elvin into the world of the microcontroller, a generic and portable Elvin library that would be suitable for application to an embedded device was needed.

Embedded Elvin libraries that implement a subset of the complete Elvin protocol have been built and tested:

• A production (transmission only) class A library, based around UDP
• A production and consumption (transmission and reception) class B library, based around TCP.
• An advanced library, incorporating a rudimentary Elvin quenching facility.

The libraries are written in C, with all non-portable sections clearly identified. Each has been successfully tested on a standard Solaris machine and on an Ethernut embedded development kit running the NutOS operating system. The class A library has been successfully ported to a Rabbit 2000 development kit running Dynamic C. A network of simple communicating devices has been constructed to demonstrate and test the effectiveness of Elvin in the embedded environment.

These libraries provide the embedded designer with the flexibility to weigh feature-set against footprint and operational requirements and choose the embedded Elvin library that best suits their project. A number of future directions for the embedded Elvin libraries have been outlined to demonstrate the potential of Elvin.

Toby Smith
s354335@student.uq.edu.au

Thesis Document (PDF)

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