Fine-grained tailoring of component behaviour for embedded systems

Abstract

The application of run-time reconfigurable component models to networked embedded systems has a number of significant advantages such as encouraging software reuse, adaptation to dynamic environmental conditions and management of changing application demands. However, reconfiguration at the granularity of components is inherently heavy-weight and thus costly in embedded scenarios. This paper argues that in some cases component-based reconfiguration imposes an unnecessary overhead and that more fine-grained support for the tailoring of component functionality is required. This paper advocates for a high-level policy-based approach to tailoring component functionality. To that end, we introduce a lightweight framework that supports fine-grained adaptation of component functionality based upon high-level policy specifications. We have realized and evaluated a prototype of this framework for the LooCI component model. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.