Network-centric Middleware for Service Oriented Architectures across Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

The increasing ubiquity of mobile embedded systems has been matched by the evolution of a variety of wireless network standards and technologies. The major constraints of wireless embedded systems are limitations of communication bandwidth, processing capabilities, and battery power. Remote wireless embedded systems often act as sensors, which provide data to a certain community. The exchange of data is nowadays usually realized through Web services. For standard Web services an XML parser is required, which demands a lot of processing power whereas embedded devices with their resource constraints provide only limited processing capabilities. Another drawback of standard Web services is the huge communication overhead due to the use of human readable XML. On the other hand using standard Web service technology enables service developers to easily integrate new embedded devices to their network or to the Internet. This paper reports on the on-going work of the key European research project MORE, which brings the embedded system world together with the Web services world. MORE introduces a new connector concept easing the handling of heterogeneous communication channels and muSOA for reducing the message size and processing demands for parsing XML messages.