A Component-Based Technology for Hardware and Software Components

One of the challenges in development of embedded systems is to cope with hardware and software components simultaneously. Often is their integration cumbersome due to their incompatibilities, different specifications and different approaches in their development. In this paper we present a component-based technology for building distributed embedded systems consisting of both embedded hardware devices and software components. To obtain a uniform view on hardware and software we have developed a new component model - UComp. Our technology consists of the UComp component model that allows treating remote devices as components, and a run-time framework that supports this component model when the system is deployed. To evaluate the principles we have developed a prototype tool that implements the technology and uses the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) standard for communication between system parts.