RESTful Service Development for Resource-Constrained Environments

Abstract

The use of resource-constrained devices, such as smartphones, PDAs, Tablet PCs, and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is spreading rapidly in the business community and our daily life. Accessing services from such devices is very common in ubiquitous environments, but mechanisms to describe, implement and distribute these services remain a major challenge. Web services have been characterized as an efficient and widely-adopted approach to overcome heterogeneity, while this technology is still heavyweight for resource-constrained devices. The emergence of REST architectural style as a lightweight and simple interaction model has encouraged researchers to study the feasibility of exploiting REST principles to design and integrate services hosted on devices with limited capabilities. In this chapter, we discuss the state-of-the-art in applying REST concepts to develop Web services for WSNs and smartphones as two representative resource-constrained platforms, and then we provide a comprehensive survey of existing solutions in this area. In this context, we report on the DigiHome platform, a home monitoring middleware solution, which enables efficient service integration in ubiquitous environments using REST architectural style. In particular, we target our reference platforms for home monitoring systems, namely WSNs and smartphones, and report our experiments in applying the concept of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) in order to provide resource-efficient RESTful distribution of Web services for those platforms.