embServe: Embedded Services for Constrained Devices

Implementing, managing and updating large-scale complex IoT applications is still a non-trivial challenge. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are increasingly used for this purpose, given their well-defined communication interfaces and configurable service-to-service links that ease the implementation of complex data flows. However, these architectures usually stop at the edge, not supporting far-edge resource-constrained devices. This paper proposes embServe, a new service-oriented framework that enables SOA on networks of constrained devices. It allows users to deploy services compiled independently of the base application and configure their connections using standard IoT protocols and data models. We compared a reference implementation against traditional approaches. Results show that embServe reduces resource overhead with a subtle impact on computing performance while improving application response time and uptime.