Introduction Embedded systems are becoming more and more important --- and they are becoming more and more complex. Getting through daily life without being faced with electronically controlled devices is almost unthinkable. This holds not only for the general consumer market regarding cameras, HIFI, kitchen aids, washing machines etc., but also for other markets such as aircraft or automotive industries. Today's limousines, for example, can be considered (large scale) distributed systems on wheels. There are cars in daily operation consisting of over 60 networked processors (i. e. ¯-controllers). Although these systems are quite large with respect to the number of ¯-controllers, they are still small with respect to memory size. In the above mentioned case, 1--2 MB of global memory (for the entire embedded distributed system) is not uncommon --- and this would already be more than luxurious. Typically, a single ¯-controller-based