Contemporary products and systems often consist of multiple separate parts with each an embedded processor on board. Such an embedded processor board has its own memory and input and output peripherals. The parts of a system must cooperate in a coordinated way, such that to the user it seems that he or she interacting with only one thing. In order to create such coordinated behaviour, the parts of a system have to exchange data and control.

This course explicitly focuses on the communication between these parts and how this communication is formed to support a distributed application in a robust manner. The course uses CAN networking as an example embedded networking technique to show how the need for robust embedded networking leads to a specific protocol-stack specification and implementation.