Implementing a generic component-based framework for telecontrol applications

The rapid growth of telecontrol systems is one of the major trends in today's network-oriented community. The implementation of generic frameworks, consisting of reusable components that can form the basis for the development of such systems, is a necessity. There is a plethora of associated applications that can be developed in a distributed environment, such as audio/video teleconferencing, groupware and collaborative computing environments, remote controlled services, etc. In this paper we design and implement a generic framework of components that can be used for the realization of telecontrol applications. This category of applications focuses primarily on the issues of managing distributed units on remote end-systems. Such applications contain remote units and administrators that are connected and exchange data and control messages. We analyse the outlined architecture of our framework and the most important system operations. We also describe the communication protocol used in message exchanges between the constituent components. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of our framework by presenting two applications that were created by extending the basic software infrastructure. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.