Successful eMuCo exhibitions in VTC2009-Spring in Barcelona
and ICT-MobileSummit 2009 in Santander

In an effort to develop an open platform for future smart phones, eMuCo researchers and industry partners conducted trial runs to bring virtualization techniques on multi-core mobile prototypes aiming at power saving and rise in processing capacity of the mobile phones.

The first integration phase looking toward the final eMuCo demonstrator was completed, exhibited and discussed with representatives from academies, industry and public bodies during recent events as VTC2009-Spring in Barcelona and ICT-Mobile summit 2009 in Santander. Two trial runs were showcased in these events.

The first trial run: A platform basis, which combines a L4 microkernel with a runtime environment layer hosting a graphical multi-threaded fractal generation application, all running on an ARM11 MPCore evaluation board. The demo trial presented a load balancer control panel where the fractal application threads can be manually re-allocated partially or totally on the four available cores and visualize the impact on the core utilization and the processing speed of the fractal application. "The platform basis setup allows us to evaluate the low-level mechanisms on which the full load balancing facility will be built upon", said Adam Lackorzynski, core operating system developer.

The second trial run: Hardware/software co-design methodology, which showed how by using virtual prototyping of a multi-core hardware platform based on ARM11 MPCore and executing an LTE protocol stack software component, written originally in Specification and Description Language (SDL), enables fast exploration of different hardware and software design options at high level of abstraction in order to make early system design decisions. The demo trial presented the impact of changes of cache memory in the processing time of the layer two of the data plane of LTE protocol stack. "As programming multi core processors is prohibitively complicated and can nowadays only be performed by few programmers in an efficient manner, model driven development becomes a vital means to perform this task. Saying this we implemented the LTE layer two functionality with IBMs SDL tools which are going to support embedded multi core architectures in the near future", said Attila Bilgic, coordinator of eMuCo. "Early verification of the generated code is performed on a computer emulated HW architecture allowing for fast error detection and respective correction. Moreover a true HW/SW codesign process can be established in this way with incremental modification in SW and HW thus giving room for an overall system optimization"

eMuCo at IEEE - VTC Conference

It was the first time that eMuCo participated as exhibitor at the Vehicular Technology Conference. The 2009 IEEE 69th VTC Conference was held in the Mediterranean city of Barcelona, Spain, where eMuCo presented its revolutionary concept catching the attention of many of the attendees. The conference hosted over 600 participants to discuss and exchange ideas in the fields of mobile, wireless and vehicular technology.

eMuCo at ICT-MobileSummit

The success was repeated at ICT-MobileSummit 2009 in Santander. This was the eighteenth in a series of Annual Conferences supported by the European Commission where the eMuCo consortium exhibited again its trial runs and shared experiences.

Thorough systems integration testing is now under way in preparation for upcoming virtualization layer and a new version of the load balancer testing.