Research is focused upon a number of distinct but related themes.

• Requirements analysis: A major effort has been to define terminology for distributed object communication in an embedded system and to define abstract requirements for a middleware platform/framework that facilitate object communication. The requirements have been formulated as a set of run-time scenarios in a frequency transformer system that can be implemented using a variety of architectures and underlying technical platforms.
• Remote Method Invocation: Here we are studying the implications and consequences of introducing the abstractions of objects and remote object invocation in resource-constrained systems such as embedded systems. A number of approaches have been reported, for instance Real-time and Embedded CORBA where the challenge is to make CORBA fit and run on resource-constrained systems. Our approach is to "go the other way" and build a minimalist framework that supports the basic object communication paradigm but with minimal penalties with respect to computational overhead and memory usage.
• Architectures for communication in embedded systems: Here we are studying architectures and analyzing their properties with respect to a number of qualities such as abstraction level and modifiability of the underlying source code, performance with respect to static and dynamic memory usage as well as computational through-put, hard- and soft real-time aspects, etc. We are working with traditional pipelined architectures, with blackboard architectures, and with architectures based upon the metaphor of shared memory.
• Pervasive systems: Here we are studying how future distributed and embedded systems will take part in a pervasive computing environment and the requirements this will impose on the software and architecture of such embedded systems. For example, what architectural issues must be considered if a user wants to interact with an embedded system at home using his mobile phone while sitting in a train?

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