XML-based Web service generation for microcontroller-based sensor actor networks

The development of applications for embedded sensor actor networks involves two major challenges: one of them is the communication between a diversity of widespread resource constraint nodes. The other one is the infrastructure dynamics. Web service based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) would perfectly meet such unique characteristics of embedded networks and ease the development of applications. Standardized Web services, however, process usually plain XML messages which are not suitable for small embedded devices with very limited resources due to XML´s verbosity, its bandwidth usage, and its associated processing overhead. The paper addresses these issues and describes an innovative source code generation technique by means of W3C´s Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format for developing XML-based Web services for microcontrollers. This offers developers a seamless use of the wide-spreadWeb service protocols in the embedded domain. First evaluation results prove the applicability of the generated XML-basedWeb services on microcontroller-based devices.