WebAssembly on Resource-Constrained IoT Devices: Performance, Efficiency, and Portability

TL;DR

This paper evaluates WebAssembly's performance, efficiency, and portability on resource-limited IoT devices, demonstrating its potential as a secure, cross-platform runtime despite some performance trade-offs.

Contribution

It provides an empirical assessment of WebAssembly on microcontrollers, comparing lightweight runtimes to native execution and highlighting its viability for embedded IoT applications.

Findings

WASM offers acceptable performance and energy efficiency trade-offs.

Native execution outperforms WASM in speed and energy consumption.

WASM is suitable for IoT when portability and security are prioritized.

Abstract

The increasing heterogeneity of hardware and software in the Internet of Things (IoT) poses a major challenge for the portability, maintainability and deployment of software on devices with limited resources. WebAssembly (WASM), originally designed for the web, is increasingly recognized as a portable, secure and efficient runtime environment that can overcome these challenges. This paper explores the feasibility of using WASM in embedded IoT systems by evaluating its performance, memory footprint and energy consumption on three representative microcontrollers: the Raspberry Pi Pico, the ESP32 C6 and the nRF5340. Two lightweight WASM runtimes, WAMR and wasm3, are compared with the native C execution. The results show that while the native execution remains superior in terms of speed and energy efficiency, WASM offers acceptable trade-offs in return for cross-platform compatibility and sandbox execution. The results highlight that WASM is a viable option for embedded IoT applications when portability and security outweigh strict performance constraints, and that further runtime optimization could extend its practicality in this area.