Travel Report from RTAS 2000

Lars Albertsson
Swedish Institute of Computer Science
lalle@sics.se

Jul 3, 2000

The sixth IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2000) was held May 31 to June 2 in Washington DC, USA. I had received a travel grant from the ARTES mobility to visit this conference, which is one of the main annual events in real-time research. My purpose for visiting the conference was twofold: to (hopefully) attend presentations of good research papers and to get an overview of the real-time research field.

The papers presented were of decent, but not great quality. However, a few papers on soft real-time systems contained interesting work. I assume there were also a few good theoretical papers, whose quality I cannot assess as I am not proficient in the field.

Tarek Abdelzaher presented a paper with the title ``An Automated Profiling Subsystem for QoS-Aware Services''. It proposed an automated mechanism for determining application reservations based on estimation theory and profiling of running systems. The paper included an implementation and benchmark of a web server with a mixed workload. The proposal seems like a realistic approach for managing reservations in servers with soft real-time requirements.

Yoon, Bestavros and Matta had written a paper with the title ``SomeCast: A Paradigm for Real-Time Adaptive Reliable multicast''. The paper introduced a receiver-driven paradigm for reliable multicast. They also addressed temporal quality guarantees of multicast communication by adapting the amount of redundancy depending on the distance between deadlines. Their design seems like a good idea, although it is only useful under very specific circumstances in its current form.

The conference contained a mix of papers from the whole field of real-time research. There was also a panel discussing a subject common to all research areas: the gap between the needs of industry and research topics¹. Thus, the conference gave a good overview of the research field as well as the industrial needs.

The conference was held in an old American luxury hotel, and the accommodation, food and associated events were great. However, the lack of internet connection at the conference site was quite disturbing. Overall, I enjoyed the stay in Washington, in particular the excellent collection of museums.

Footnotes:

¹ The panel actually mentioned ARTES as an example of a national effort to strengthen research in the field.