Towards hard real-time system engineering

One needs to develop (for application) usable models to design dynamic reconfigurable distributed hardware and software systems, supporting permanently available computer resources and hard real-time constraints. In order to develop such a model one needs to look at the development process of an actual application. The specific application exhibiting all the above requirements is a micro satellite based communications network integrated with its ground control network. Limited availability of resources and real-time response is inherent in the system. The architectural abstraction used across the system is that of real-time associative memory (RTAM).<>