Abstract
Automotive, avionic, or body-area networks are systems that
consist of several communicating control units specialized for
certain purposes. Typically, different constraints regarding fault
tolerance, availability and also flexibility are imposed on these
systems. In this article, we will present a novel framework for
increasing fault tolerance and flexibility by solving the problem
of hardware/software codesign online. Based on field-programmable
gate arrays (FPGAs) in combination with CPUs, we allow migrating
tasks implemented in hardware or software from one node to
another. Moreover, if not enough hardware/software resources are
available, the migration of functionality from hardware to
software or vice versa is provided. Supporting such flexibility
through services integrated in a distributed operating system for
networked embedded systems is a substantial step towards
self-adaptive systems. Beside the formal definition of methods and
concepts, we describe in detail a first implementation of a
reconfigurable networked embedded system running automotive
applications.
