Real-time capable hardware-based parser for efficient XML interchange

The use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) for data interchange became standard in most computer systems. The benefits of XML documents are their easy handling, dynamic adjustment to nearly all needs, availability of parsers for any programming language, and the human readability. Despite many advantages of XML, it is still primarily applied in software-based systems. The serious drawback of XML is the size of the document and the text-based parsing. Further, the dissemination of the Web service technology in automation demands very fast data processing especially in real-time scenarios. This implies the compactness of the data representation and fast parsing possibility. In such cases, hardware-based solutions are often used to speed up the process. Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) was developed to leverage the deployment of XML in deeply embedded systems. EXI provides very high XML compression rates without additional processing load. However, EXI parsing was only tested in software-based systems. As very fast processing speed is targeted in this work for, e.g., real-time systems, which software-based parsers most probably cannot achieve, we provide an investigation and the prototype implementation of the EXI parser in hardware and compare it to software-based solutions.