Internet-enabled embedded device

摘要

An embedded device for direct connection to the Internet includes a micro-controller unit, a network interface device, application-specific I/O hardware and an internal bus for connecting them. The micro-controller unit implements a TCP/IP stack in which the various processes are sequentially and preemptively called by a central program loop. The stack processes incoming packets on the fly rather than buffering them; it also sends outgoing packets as they are generated rather than buffering them. When a user interacts with the embedded device over the Internet from a remote host computer, shadowing software runs on the remote host computer to emulate the embedded device, thus offloading processing from the embedded device to the host computer.