The Application of Programmable DSPs in Mobile Communications

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A Flexible Distributed Java Environment for Wireless PDA Architectures Based on DSP Technology

Gilbert Cabillic, Jean-Philippe Lesot, Frédéric Parain, Michel Banâtre, Valérie Issarny, Teresa Higuera, Gérard Chauvel, Serge Lasserre and Dominique D'Inverno

8.1 Introduction

Java offers several benefits that could facilitate the use of wireless Personal Digital Assistants (WPDAs) for the user. First, Java is portable, and that means that it is independent of the hardware platform it runs on, which is very important for reducing the cost of application development. As Java can be run anywhere, the development of applications can be done on a desktop without the need of a real hardware platform. Second, Java supports dynamic loading of applications and can significantly contribute to extend the use of WPDA.

Nevertheless, even if Java has a very good potential, one of its main drawbacks is the need of resources for running a Java application. By resources, we mean memory volume, execution time and energy consumption, which are the resources examined for embedded system trade-off conception. It is clear that the success of Java is conditioned by the availability of a Java execution environment that will manage efficiently these resources.

Our goal is to offer a Java execution environment for WPDA architectures that enables a good trade-off between performance, energy and memory usage. This chapter is composed of three different parts. As energy consumption is very important for WPDAs, ...