P2P Mode Application Research For Multi-Media Information Terminal

With Internet application population we are living in networking times, post-PC era.Not only PC but also various embedded equipments can access Internet, those terminals are called information appliances (IA) as Palm PC, Personal Digital Assistance (PDA), Video Phone, Mobile Phone, Set-top box, Web TV and Digital camera etc. Research of operation system to IA is an essential important subject of Software Engineering.A typical process of developing embedded products is from selection of MCU, designation of circuits and peripherals, selection of embedded OS, application program design, firmware design to integration of the all.There are significant difference between developing application programs for embedded products and desktops. Operation systems and CPU of general PCs are all based on Wintel . Software Engineers are free to utilize all kinds of available resources despite of understanding the hardware and the operation systems, and users of desktops are assumed professional to operate the quite complex system. Besides, the mature basis helps developing programs for desktops more convenient and efficiency.Meanwhile developing programs for embedded products is more complex. Achieving a stable and easily operated system relies on varieties of aid tooling and appliance, thorough consideration of different platforms, adjusting various saving-loading procedures. Engineers need to understand nature of embedded systems,hardware and software characteristic, so as to measure resources invested on software and hardware building (need of hardware knowledge is even more important than developing of the system itself).The assay takes example of developing operation system for a P2P mode multimedia terminal equipped by WinCE and ARM 32-digit embedded microchip, attempting to describe a whole/detailed process of developing an embedded system. I tried to practice the related knowledge of Software Engineering learned in the past few years.Because too much content is involved to develop an embedded system, to make the assay structure clear and emphasize some focal points I put my efforts into 3 major aspects: software engineering methods planning for a project, compiling programs to test hardware system and compiling of P2P application programs. I believe a try of the practice is meaningful and will benefit my future jobs.