ABSTRACT
Embedded systems are nowadays widely found throughout the entire society. We can fi nd them across all kinds of activities. The application fi eld is so wide that it goes from industry, passing by biomedical applications, or by home automation, without forgetting its use in personal assistance applications. This dissemination has required, at different levels, a high increase of the structural complexity of these systems. In this context, we can forecast that several processing units could cooperate jointly to perform one or more tasks simultaneously. These tasks have a distributed characteristic, demanding, at the same time, the availability of real-time processing capacities executed by a single processing unit, or shared by a pool of cooperating processing units. This scenario is possible only if an infrastructure that supports this mode of operation is available.
