ABSTRACT
Owing to continued developments in the integration of processing and communications technology along the last decades, distributed architectures have progressively become pervasive in many real-time application domains, ranging from avionic to automotive systems, industrial machinery, feedback control, robotics, computer vision, and multimedia [16]. These architectures present several advantages: they favor
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dependability through easy replication of nodes and definition of error-containment regions; composability since the system can be built by integrating nodes that constitute independent subsystems; scalability through easy addition of new nodes to increase the system capacity; and maintainability owing to the modularity of the architecture and easy node replacement [10].
