ABSTRACT
Acomputing system is typically considered as an embedded systemwhen it is a programmable device with limited resources (energy, memory, computation power, etc.) that serves one (or few) applications and is embedded in a larger system. Its limited resources make it ineffective to be used as a general-purpose computing system. However, they usually have to meet hard requirements, such as time deadlines and other real-time processing requirements. Embedded systems can be classified in two general categories: () stand-alone embedded systems,
where all hardware and software components of the system are physically close, incorporated into a single device, for example, a personal digital assistant (PDA) or a system in a washing machine or a fax, and there is no attachment to a network and () distributed (networked) embedded systems, where several autonomous components-each one a stand-alone embedded system-communicate with each other over a network in order to deliver services or support an application. Several architectural and design parameters lead to the development of distributed embedded applications, such as the placement of processing power at the physical point where an event takes place, data reduction, etc. [].
