Lightweight remote procedure calls for wireless sensor and actuator networks

This paper presents S-RPC, a lightweight framework for remote procedure calls on wireless sensor and actuator nodes. It enables seamless interoperability between nodes by offering a common interface to remote method invocations. In the past, communication between these embedded devices has been realized over proprietary protocols specifically tailored for the given use case. This, however, strongly limits the possibilities to integrate new functions into the network and extend it by new sensing and actuation devices. In contrast to proprietary solutions, S-RPC is a framework which allows unified access to functions on remote devices. S-RPC uses an efficient data representation scheme to achieve small message sizes, and permits dynamic integration of new devices with different functions into the network during runtime. We show its real-world applicability through a reference implementation, which occupies less than 4% of a TelosB's resources, and increases the energy consumption per invocation by just 0.11%.