The safety-critical edge should be sparse

Conference item

The modern world is increasingly computerised and, as more functionality is shifted to the edges of systems in bids to reduce latency or energy consumption, the Internet of Things (IoT) increasingly includes safety-critical systems. A typical such system is 'functionally dense,' with a time-shared processing element (PE) carrying out many tasks; we believe that they should instead be functionally sparse, with many small PEs dedicated to single tasks. We present case studies of this design approach and introduce FUNK, our effort to build the tools that will support the development of hard real-time, functionally safe systems that follow this approach.

Authors: McSherry, L; Bowles, NE

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: EWSN '26: Proceedings of the 2026 International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks
• Pages: 237-242
• Publication date: 2026-09-16
• Acceptance date: 2026-08-11
• Event title: 23rd International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN 2026)
• Event location: Dresden, Germany
• Event website: https://ewsn26.netd.cs.tu-dresden.de/
• Event start date: 2026-09-16
• Event end date: 2026-09-19
• DOI: 10.3217/h24y-6w98
• ISSN: 2562-2331
• Language: English
• Keywords: real-time computing; functional safety; static analysis; RISC-V