Embedded system management using WBEM

Web-based management solutions have become an increasingly important and promising approach especially for small and embedded environments. This article presents the design and implementation of an embedded system that leverages the Web-based enterprise management (WBEM) solution. WBEM has been designed to manage large heterogeneous environments but has not yet been deployed on small and embedded devices. First, we evaluate existing WBEM implementations due to its resource requirements. Second, we describe the design of an embedded network device that has been realized on a system-on-chip prototyping platform. A small-footprint WBEM server has been integrated that requires less than 900 kB of non-volatile memory. We provide performance measurements of our solution and compare the results with other Web-based management approaches. They show that WBEM is suitable to run on such resource-constraint devices and to be applicable in practice.