Push-based low-latency solution for Tracked Resource Set protocol : An extension of Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration specification

Abstract: Currently, the development of embedded system requires a variety of software and tools. Moreover, most of this software and tools are standalone applications, thus they are unconnected and their data can be inconsistent and duplicated. This increase both heterogeneity and the complexity of the development environment. To address this situation, tool integration solutions based on Linked Data are used, as they provide scalable and sustainable integration across different engineering tools. Different systems can access and share data by following the Linked-Data-based Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) specification. OSLC uses the Tracked Resource Set (TRS) protocol to enable a server to expose a resource set and to enable a client to discover a resource in the resource set. Currently, the TRS protocol uses a client pull for the client to update its data and to synchronize with the server. However, this method is inefficient and time consuming. Moreover, high-frequency pulling may introduce an extra burden on the network and server, while low-frequency pulling increases the system’s latency (as seen by the client). A push-based low-latency solution for the TRS protocol was implemented using Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) technology. The TRS server uses MQTT to push the update patch (called a ChangeEvent) to the TRS client, then the client updates its content according to this ChangeEvent. As a result, the TRS client synchronizes with the TRS server in real time. Furthermore, a TRS adaptor was developed for Atlassian’s JIRA, a widely-used project and issue management tool. This JIRA-TRS adaptor provides a TRS provider with the ability to share data via JIRA with other software or tools which utilize the TRS protocol. In addition, a simulator was developed to simulate the operations in JIRA for a period of time (specifically the create, modify, and delete actions regarding issues) and acts as a validator to check if the data in TRS client matches the data in JIRA. An evaluation of the push-based TRS system shows an average synchronization delay of around 30 milliseconds. This is a huge change compared with original TRS system that synchronized every 60 seconds.