Networked Embedded Systems: A Quantitative Performance Comparison

Networked embedded systems are gaining more and more attention and their use in current network scenarios is of indisputable importance. Research community and industry are proposing novel embedded solutions, often based on network processors, for network connectivity, data processing and service delivery. Despite this, quantitative performance comparisons of such systems seem to be very hard to find. In this paper, we describe an experimental analysis of different boards for networked embedded systems using both general-purpose and network processors, and running both commercial and open source operating systems. The results show that network-processor based boards are able to attain very high performance when compared to boards based on x86 processors, especially when running commercial operating systems. The analysis provides a reference for the design, development, and testing of novel networked embedded systems.