Optimized XML-based Web service generation for service communication in restricted embedded environments

Embedded network programming remains a highly complex task for developers since unique characteristics of such networks have to be faced: one of them is the communication between a diversity of resource constraint nodes. Another one is the infrastructure dynamics. The widely-used standardized Web service technologies would perfectly meet such unique characteristics and ease the development of applications. Such technologies that enable, e.g., requesting or subscribing service data, however, process usually plain XML documents which are not suitable for small embedded devices with very limited resources. This is due to XML´s verbosity, its bandwidth usage, and its associated processing overhead. The paper addresses these issues and describes an innovative and optimized source code generation technique by means of W3C´s Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format for developing XML-based Web services for the embedded domain. This offers developers a seamless use of the wide-spread service protocols in the embedded domain as well. Evaluation results based on the dataset from the ISO/IEC standardization of the vehicle to grid communication interface (V2G CI) prove the applicability of the generated XML-based Web services of restricted devices in terms of message size, performance, and code footprint.