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

BSTRACTRecent 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. WebAssembly, 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-the-art WebAssembly AOT runtime, and reduces energy consumption by 1.2×~4.9× while guaranteeing the sandboxed execution of WebAssembly modules.