Research trends in real-time computing for embedded systems

Abstract

Most of today's embedded systems are required to work in dynamic environments, where the characteristics of the computational load cannot always be predicted in advance. Still timely responses to events have to be provided within precise timing constraints in order to guarantee a desired level of performance. Hence, embedded systems are, by nature, inherently real-time. Moreover, most of embedded systems work under several resource constraints, due to space, weight, energy, and cost limitations imposed by the specific application. As a consequence, efficient resource management is a critical aspect in embedded systems, that must be considered at different architecture levels.The objective of this document is to present the major research trends identified by the international community on real-time systems to make the next generation embedded systems more predictable and adaptive to environmental changes. After describing the characteristics of modern embedded applications, the paper presents the problems of the current approaches and discusses the new research trends in operating systems and scheduling emerging to overcome them.