A Bytecode Service Composition Engine for Embedded Services

With the development of embedded systems, people tend to abstract the capacity of an embedded equipment as a service in order to simplify the development, deployment, management and maintenance of the embedded software. By aggregating abilities of individual embedded devices via service composition, people can easily build a more reliable and efficient system. Although the service composition problem has been extensively studied in the field of Web, the adoptation of service composition technique to embedded devices stumps due to the resource limitation and platform heterogeneity of embedded systems. To address these problems, this paper builds a service composition engine for embedded systems that comprises three main works: First, this paper provides a uniform method to represent the embedded service composition problem. Second, this paper designs a compiling method based on topological sorting to convert the unified composition information into the service composition file that represents the way to implement the composite service. Third, this paper devises a bytecode virtual machine to execute the service composition file, and implements the composite service in a resource-friendly way. At last, a carefully devised experiment is conducted, and the result shows our devised engine provides a lightweight, reliable and well-performed way to realize the service composition technique on embedded devices.