Jini meets embedded control networking: A case study in portability failure

Jini Meets Embedded Control Networking: a case study in portability failure The Robust Self-Configuring Embedded Systems (RoSES) project seeks to achieve graceful degradation through software reconfiguration. To accomplish this goal, systems must automatically reconfigure despite nodes fail-ing, being replaced by inexact spares, or being upgraded. Jini seemed to provide the required spontaneous network-ing infrastructure, but turned out to make deep assumptions about using TCP and UDP. This is appropriate for the Internet-enabled devices that the Jini designers envisioned, but typical distributed embedded systems employ real-time, reliable data transmission such as the Control Area Net-work (CAN), rather than TCP. Object-oriented technology such as Jini is often represented as being suitable for use in real-time embedded systems. But despite Jini’s goal of plat-form-independence, it required extensive re-engineering to function on CAN. This case study of an actual implementa-tion of Jini on a CAN network demonstrates that the differ-ences between general purpose and embedded systems can be more fundamental than is generally appreciated. 1