Lifting the level of abstraction dealt with in programming of networked embedded computing systems (Keynote Speech)

Abstract

The scale and complexity of advanced networked embedded computing (NEC) application systems are steadily growing. The need has become increasingly acute for a programming method and style that imposes much less amounts of detail-handling on the real-time (RT) distributed computing (DC) programmer than the currently widely used method does. With this motivation a number of different attempts have been made toward establishing high-level RT DC objects. The TMO scheme developed over the past 18 years by the author and his collaborators is one of those attempts. In terms of lifting the level of abstractions of main program building-blocks, the TMO scheme has been about the most daring attempt. However, all the attempts have not yet reached the level of sufficient maturity in that the ease of guaranteeing the timeliness of critical output actions with a high degree of precision has not been much demonstrated. Some basic principles and techniques learned from past research on TMO are briefly reviewed. Then major remaining research issues are discussed. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.