Preface

With the rapid adoption of the Internet, communications devices have increased in importance. These devices are used in various parts of the network starting from network enabled PDAs and pagers, right up through to complex Central Office switches. Most of these network devices haves a robust communications software function, which is used to communicate with other devices as well as with a controlling entity like a network manager.

As in other areas of engineering, design is the first step in developing a product. There are several books on networking and communication including engineering approaches to network systems design. This book focuses primarily on the software aspect of communications systems – specifically those used to build embedded communications devices. Host systems have had protocol and networking functionality for several years – they are in fact, treated as a part of the OS. This book focuses on embedded communications systems, specifically those which use a real time operating system.

This book approaches communications software design from the perspective of a designer of embedded systems software. It assumes a knowledge of real time concepts including tasks, interrupts, scheduling and inter process communication.. It incorporates several issues from engineering folklore and best practices at various engineering organizations. Readers might be familiar with some of the concepts since they might have seen these addressed in their own internal company documentation or in some white papers from industry vendors.

During my years in designing and developing communications software, I have been fortunate to be associated with several communications software experts. These individuals have provided me with and pointed me to various tips and techniques for communications software design. This book grew out of a need to capture several of those issues, so that engineers venturing into communications software design have a good foundation.

Target Audience

The basic audience is embedded engineers who are writing communications software. This includes both people who are just venturing into communications software development as well as those who have some experience in the area. The first group of people will be able to obtain information in one place – information that they would normally have to glean from articles, colleagues, internal documents and some Web sites. The second group of people would obtain an idea of some of the other issues in the system – for example, protocol stack developers would learn about system architecture and software.

The audience also includes practicing embedded engineers who are just starting to write communications software, as well as graduate/undergraduate students working on communications software projects.