WASMICO: Micro-containers in microcontrollers with WebAssembly

Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has created a complex environment where hardware and software interact in complex ways. Despite being a prime candidate for applying well-established software engineering practices, IoT has not seen the same level of adoption as other areas, such as cloud development. This discrepancy is even more evident in the case of edge devices, where programming and managing applications can be challenging due to their heterogeneous nature and dependence on specific toolchains and languages. However, the emergence of WebAssembly as a viable solution for running high-level languages on some devices presents an opportunity to streamline development practices, such as DevOps. In this paper, we present WASMICO — a firmware and command-line utility that allows for the execution and management of application lifecycles in microcontrollers. Our solution has been benchmarked against other state-of-the-art tools, demonstrating its feasibility, novel features, and empirical evidence that it outperforms some of the most widely used solutions for running high-level code on these devices. Overall, our work aims to promote the use of well-established software engineering practices in the IoT domain, helping to bridge the gap between cloud and edge development.