Editorial
Real-time embedded software for multi-core platforms

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Introduction

The ever-growing real-time embedded software provides dynamic intelligence and plays an increasingly critical role in all aspects of our lives. The real-time embedded software controls a wide variety of systems ranging from nuclear power plants and energy grids to cars and cell phones. Ensuring that real-time embedded systems operate correctly is therefore of paramount important to the preservation of our modern way of life. Despite a wide body of research and development effort, ensuring the safe and secure operation of real-time embedded software remains an open challenge. At the same time, the emergence of multi-core hardware has introduced an additional level of complexity to the computation. The technological and economic compulsion for migrating to multi-core platforms further exacerbates concurrency-related issues for real-time embedded software.

This special issue is in response to the increasing convergence of real-time embedded software design. The research papers selected for this special issue represent recent progresses in the field, including works on real-time computing systems, GPU technologies, multicore architectures, wireless sensor network technologies as well as cyber physical systems and applications. All of these papers not only provide novel ideas and state-of-the-art techniques in the field, but also stimulate future research in the sustainable environment.

Section snippets

Real-time systems

Modern embedded systems are shifting towards computation platform with multiple processing units. Multiprocessor or multi-core architectures are favored for their potential of providing higher computational power with reduced energy consumption and heat dissipation. However, to fully exploit this capability, the intrinsic parallelism of software application must be taken into account, leading to increased dimension of system design space. The paper by Yifan Wu, Zhigang Gao and Guojun Dai,

GPU technologies

Finding an optimal solution for the search problem becomes an important research question nowadays. There are increasingly swarm intelligence that is in nature the collective behavior of social animals used for finding a near optimal solution. Bees Algorithm is a population-based method that is a computational bound algorithm that inspired by the natural behavior of honey bees to finds a near-optimal solution for the search problem. Recently, many parallel swarm based algorithms have been

Multicore architectures

Real-time multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) are commonplace recently, and the number of processors on an MPSoC is growing steadily. However, the performance potential of MPSoCs cannot be tapped out unless applications running on them have been highly parallelized. One common approach of parallelizing applications is task scheduling. The paper by Chao Wang, Xiaojing Feng, Xi Li, Xuehai Zhou and Peng Chen entitled “Colored Petri Net Model with Automatic Parallelization on Real-Time

Wireless sensor networks

With rapid improvements of wireless technologies, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are attracting grow-ing attention from both academia and industry. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is able to achieve low- power transmissions in low-rate and short-distance Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). It supports a Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) allocation mechanism for time-critical and delay-sensitive data transmissions. However, the inflexible First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) GTS allocation policy and

Conclusions

All of the above papers address either system design and integration methodologies or models of computation and optimizations. They also trigger further related research and technology improvements in application of real-time embedded systems. Honorably, this special issue serves as a landmark source for education, information, and reference to professors, researchers and graduate students interested in updating their knowledge about or active in real-time systems, operating systems and

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