Bringing webassembly to resource-constrained iot devices for seamless device-cloud integration

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the progressive integration between IoT (Internet of Things) devices and the cloud server, which promotes the efficiency and interoperability of IoT applications. We-bAssembly, known for its performance and portability, is considered a promising technology to bridge the heterogeneity between devices and the server. Nevertheless, resource-constrained devices, which are commonly deployed in the wild, have difficulty participating in this device-cloud integration because they can hardly run WebAssembly efficiently.Hence, we propose WAIT, a lightweight WebAssembly runtime on resource-constrained IoT devices for device-cloud integrated applications. WAIT is the first work to enable the Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation of WebAssembly on resource-constrained devices by leveraging several approaches to reduce memory usage. Moreover, WAIT introduces various safety checks at compile-time to guarantee the sandbox execution of WebAssembly and optimizes energy consumption for IoT devices. Results show that WAIT achieves 84.8× lower RAM usage compared with the state-of-theart WebAssembly AOT runtime, and reduces energy consumption by 1.2×~4.9× while guaranteeing the sandboxed execution of We-bAssembly modules. CCS CONCEPTS• Computer systems organization → Embedded and cyberphysical systems; • Networks → Cloud computing; Network components; • Information systems → Computing platforms.

An Overview of WebAssembly for IoT: Background, Tools, State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Future Directions

“…It uses Wasmachine with an improved performance evaluations, with results indicating that Wasm applications running on Wasmachine are up to 21% faster than native Linux applications. Another work [59] introduces ThingSpire OS, an IoT operating system that integrates cloud-edge computing through Wasm. Wasm is central to ThingSpire OS's design, which uses it to ensure consistent execution across IoT devices, edges, and the cloud.…”

“…Studies have discussed the increasing integration of IoT devices and cloud servers to enhance the efficiency of IoT applications [111,112]. While Wasm is considered a potential solution to overcome the heterogeneity between devices and servers, it presents challenges for resource-constrained devices.…”

“…• Analyzing the provided articles, the key research gaps in the field of Wasm, especially when applied to edge computing, IoT devices, and serverless architectures, appear to be as follows: • Efficient Execution on Resource-Constrained Devices: [111] discusses the problem of executing Wasm on resource-constrained IoT devices. It appears that further research is needed to optimize the execution of Wasm applications on devices with limited memory, processing power, or energy resources.…”

A System for Bounding the Execution Cost of Web Assembly Functions

“…Or a large, complex application written for a desktop environment (such as a CAD program [5] or a game rendering engine [69]) can be compiled to WebAssembly to, again, run in a web browser. It's not limited, however, to only run in a web browser: there are efforts under way in industry and standards groups to apply the concepts of WebAssembly in operating systems [10], Internet of Things devices [48],…”

“…Earth [28] and AutoCAD [5]. Additionally, the use of WebAssembly in non-Web contexts was evolving quickly [10,48,81].…”