Currently in industry a new airborne camera-system is under development. For this purpose many different image processing modules have to exchange data and have to communicate to each other throughout a network. The on board hardware is connected via Gigabit/Ethernet, whereas the communication to ground station is established with an S-Band Microwave Link. Each image processing task is executed in real time with a frequency of 3 Hz. Thus, the used middleware has to ensure fast communication to meet the real time criteria. Also large images have to be transmitted through the on board network. A new middleware has to be developed. This middleware has to ensure message passing communication. It shall provide the publish/subscribe concept. Also synchronous and asynchronous client/server communication has to be implemented. The shared memory handling should be organized by the middleware. Also a routing strategy has to be implemented. For the foregoing reasons an instance of the middleware should run on every host at the on board network. The system should run in a distributed network, where communication between image processing modules is ensured. Moreover an application programming interface must be provided to the programmer of such modules. All functions offered by the middleware need to be tested so that high quality of service is guaranteed. The performance of implemented services needs to be analyzed. Therefore various scenarios must be defined. For each of these scenarios traffic throughput, latency times and fault tolerances need to be monitored. The software must be designed and described in the UML (Unified Modelling Language) and implemented in the C++ programming language. Also a well written documentation must be prepared.
