Aura as a Platform for Distributed Sensing and Control

Aura is an evolving software architecture and “real-time middleware” implementation that has been in use since 1994. As an integrated solution to many problems encountered in the design of distributed, real-time, interactive, multimedia programs, experience with Aura offers lessons for designers. By identifying common problems and evaluating how different systems solve them, we hope to learn how to design better systems in the future. Aspects of the Aura design considered here include message passing, how objects are interconnected, the avoidance of shared memory, the grouping of tasks and objects according to latency requirements, networking and communication issues, debugging, and the scripting language.