The publish/subscribe communication paradigm provides many-to-many communication. It simplifies the con-
struction of robust applications and the extension of existing applications. There exist several commercially avail-
able publish/subscribe middleware products. In this paper we address the issue of how one can extend this paradigm
to support real-time applications. Ideally, we would like that a message is distributed within an a priori known
amount of time to all subscribers. However, neither in a network of workstations nor in a wide area network one
can guarantee such a strong property. Our approach tries to distribute messages in a timely manner but allows a
subscriber to detect if it has not received all messages in a timely manner.