Real-time garbage collection for a multithreaded Java microcontroller

We envision the upcoming of microcontrollers and systems-on-a-chip that are based on multithreaded processor kernels due to the fast context switching ability of hardware multithreading. Moreover, we envision an extensive market for Java based applications in embedded real time systems. The paper introduces two new garbage collection algorithms that are dedicated to real time garbage collection on a multithreaded Java microcontroller. Our garbage collector runs in a thread slot in parallel to real time applications. We show that our algorithms require only about 5% of the processor time for an effective garbage collection concerning our real time benchmarks.