CREAM: A Generic Build-Time Component Framework for Distributed Embedded Systems

A component framework plays an important role in CBSD as it determines how software components are developed, packaged, assembled and deployed. A desirable component framework for developing diverse cross-domain embedded applications should meet such requirements as (1) lightweight on memory use, (2) integrated task execution model, (3) fast inter-component communication, (4) support for distributed processing, and (5) transparency from underlying communication middleware. Although current embedded system component frameworks address some of the above requirements, they fail to meet all of them taken together. We thus propose a new embedded system component framework called CREAM (component-based remote-communicating embedded application model). It achieves these goals by using build-time code generation, explicit control of task creation and execution in the component framework, static analysis of component composition to generate efficient component binding, and abstraction of the componentpsilas application logic from the communication middleware. We have implemented the CREAM component framework and conducted a series of experiments to compare its performance characteristics to a raw socket-based communication implementation and the lightweight-CCM implementation by MicoCCM.