Extensible platform software architecture design and its impact in the embedded network software engineering

With 3G system introduction, the data communication applications are a key for the mobile Internet evolution. It is a challenge to design an extensible and resource-efficient software platform for mobile multimedia services. The methodology to identify the trade-off in the software architecture design was unexplored in the past literature. The author compares the two software platforms for micro browsers in order to identify the trade-off factors between extensibility and compactness. The author summarizes the three extension schemes, abstract rendering, XML framework, and extensible common components. The author proposes a discrete component analysis to evaluate the impact from the extensible architecture. With this analysis, the author presents the footprint overhead estimate for the embedded software environment designed for mobile handsets. It is a useful measure when the trade-off between the hard-wired concise implementation and the extension-tolerant implementations.