Distributed computing and telecommunication embedded systems

In the 90s, as the World Wide Web appeared on the Internet and took it by storm, the embedded systems designers have the opportunity to advance the designs and features of their systems. This time, at the center of the development is the distributed computing technology which focuses on using the network as the computing resources. As a result, the technology promotes thin clients for telecommunication embedded systems to reduce the total system costs. Currently, there are two approaches for achieving distributed computing over a network. The Inferno system by Lucent Technologies uses a homogeneous namespace, transaction oriented protocol and virtual machine to provide distributed computing. It is designed to work primarily on a private enterprise network. The other approach is led by Sun Microsystems using CORBA, Java to achieve interactive content on Internet Web pages, and using RMI, JavaSpace as the distributed computing vehicle for embedded systems. The author discusses the progress of distributed computing technology, and explains and compares the two approaches, outlines the benefits that can be harvested by the embedded systems, and also indicates the areas for future work.