Explicit Connectors in Component Based Software Engineering for Distributed Embedded Systems

The increasing complexity of today’s embedded systems applications imposes the requirements and constraints of distributed, heterogeneous subsystem interaction to software engineers. These requirements are well met by the component based software engineering paradigm: complex software is decomposed into coherent, interacting units of execution, the so called components. Connectors are a commonly used abstraction to model the interaction between them. We propose to use explicit connectors when building distributed embedded systems applications. Explicit connectors encapsulate the logic of distributed interaction, hence they provide well defined contracts regarding properties of intercomponent communication. Our approach allows model level validation of component composition and interaction incorporating communication related constraints beyond simple interface matching. In addition, by using explicit connectors, the complexity of application components is reduced without the need for any heavy weight middleware.