Microservice Architecture for Embedded Systems

With the development of the computer technology, embedded systems are everywhere and play a more important role in human being's daily life. Under a trend of deploying the microservice architecture to software, people tend to abstract the capacity of an embedded equipment as a service to simplify the development, deployment, management and maintenance of the embedded software. Although the importance of the embedded service is rising, the development of the microservice architecture on embedded systems stumps due to the resource limitation of embedded systems. How to transplant traditional Web service techniques are hard problems to be overcome. To address these problems, we build a microservice framework for embedded systems named the embedded service framework, that comprises three main works: First, we design an embedded service model to represent embedded services in a versatile, elegant, and resource-friendly way, including its communication protocol, the service registration procedure and the service management mechanism. Second, we design a message converter to support the construction of the service proxy that enables the interaction between a Web service and an embedded service. Third, we propose a linear service composition model and implement it with a lightweight service composition engine to make embedded services cooperate with each other. A carefully devised experiment is conducted, and the result shows our devised framework provides a lightweight, well-performed microservice architecture for embedded systems.