Making Embedded Software Development More Efficient with SOA

SOA has been one of the most fascinating design paradigms for enterprise-level application software during the recent years. Key to its success has been the inherent support of reusability and scalability. This has brought forward significant advancements in the efficiency of SOA based software during development, deployment and runtime. As a result of the ongoing increase of computational power on embedded devices, and the ever-increasing connectivity of these, SOA has become relevant also for devices with medium computational capabilities like WiFi routers. Extrapolation suggests that SOA will soon be seen on typical embedded systems like sensors and actuators. In this paper we make a survey to outline the potential of SOA to become a key factor in embedded software development. We believe that by embracing this paradigm, current obstacles in the embedded development process can be addressed more effectively, leading to an efficient and less error prone design flow. Although some efforts in this direction have already been made, there are still areas open for research in order to optimize the development process for embedded SOA.