Requisites of Embedded Operating System for Network Electronics

Today, Windows®-based (and UNIX®-based) PCs have ability to access to the networks at anytime and anyplace. The benefit of such an “always-connected” environment is expanded to non-PC users with new consumer products such as Airboard and CoCoon, which we call the network electronics (or NE) products in this paper. An NE product has nature both of “embedded” and “open-ended,” and partitioned into two. The “embedded” means the software is designed and implemented in traditional embedded manners and optimized for a product to differentiate it from others. The “open-ended” means the software is designed and implemented for complying with open standards and sometimes updated after product deployment. It also has ability to download an application from Internet and run it on an NE product. These two partitions are inherently conflicted and need to be intervened by an underlying operating system, which is considered as the first role of an embedded operating system (Role 1). In addition, an NE product is facing the threat of product commoditization. The “value” of an NE product is created by the feature realized by the “embedded” partition, as well as the services on the networks accessed through the “open-ended” partition. Avoidance of the commoditization threat is to increase the “value” of an NE product. The second role of an embedded operating system is to provide facilities to realize it (Role 2). The product “value” is also produced by interconnection of two or more NE products. A single application runs on a set of interconnected NE products to create a new experience to users. The last role of an embedded operating system is to manage such a distributed environment (Role 3). This paper discusses on these three roles of an embedded operating systems in the context of an NE product development, based on the author’s experience of Aperios deployment in the product development. Then, the 7-layer model for the NE software is defined to clarify these 3 roles on the software layer. Finally the paper is concluded that three layers are identified to create product’s “value,” and should be addressed in the context of the new computing for the network electronics.