Potential of WebAssembly for Embedded Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of WebAssembly as a secure, portable, and efficient virtual machine for embedded systems, highlighting challenges, a real-world case study, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides an overview of WebAssembly's applicability in embedded systems, discusses challenges, and presents a real-world case study demonstrating its viability.

Findings

WebAssembly can be effectively used in embedded systems.

Challenges include resource constraints and real-time requirements.

A case study shows promising results for WebAssembly deployment.

Abstract

Application virtual machines provide strong isolation properties and are established in the context of software portability. Those opportunities make them interesting for scalable and secure IoT deployments. WebAssembly is an application virtual machine with origins in web browsers, that is getting rapidly adopted in other domains. The strong and steadily growing ecosystem makes WebAssembly an interesting candidate for Embedded Systems. This position paper discusses the usage of WebAssembly in Embedded Systems. After introducing the basic concepts of WebAssembly and existing runtime environments, we give an overview of the challenges for the efficient usage of WebAssembly in Embedded Systems. The paper concludes with a real world case study that demonstrates the viability, before giving an outlook on open issues and upcoming work.