Reconfigurable FPGA-based embedded Web services as distributed computational nodes

Abstract

In this article we propose a concept for an experimental class of control devices that use both a microcontroller unit (MCU) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuit. These devices can provide the functionality of full-featured Web services that are compliant with the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. Despite the fact that FPGA circuits are more expensive than consumer-grade MCUs, they potentially offer much more computational power. In scenarios in which FPGA computational power is required on demand and for short periods only, a large part of such resources might, however, remain unused or disabled. Thus we propose a system architecture and software infrastructure that simplify the utilization of temporarily unused resources for performing various tasks that can be offered as Web services on a commercial basis.