Embedded platforms for distributed real-time computing: challenges and results

Object oriented techniques have been along the last decade one of the most useful programming paradigms. However, for distributed embedded systems, the semantic gap between the object orientation layer and the underlying infrastructure is extremely large. This gap can be narrowed, should the embedded system platform provide semantically rich communication and management services. The paper outlines our research effort in the provision of such services by CAN based (Controller Area Network) systems.