A study on a garbage collector for embedded applications

In general, embedded systems, such as cellular phones and PDAs are provided with small amounts of memory and a low power processor that is slower than desktop ones. Despite these limited resources, present technology allows designers to integrate, in a single chip, an entire system. In this scenario, software development for embedded systems is an error-prone operation. In order to develop better code in less time, Java technology has gained a lot of interest from developers of embedded systems in the last few years, mainly because of its portability, code reuse, and object-oriented paradigm. On the other hand, Java requires an automatic memory management system in Java processors. This paper presents a garbage collection technique based on a software approach for an embedded Java processor. This technique is targeted for applications that are used in portable embedded systems. This paper discusses the most suited algorithm for such applications, showing also some performance overhead results.