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Performance evaluation of compact binary XML representation for constrained devices

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Internet of Things (IoT) envisages an environment in which a huge number of heterogeneous devices will interact, collaborate and provide information to users or execute actuation commands based on the users' instructions. Web services are seen as one of the most promising approaches for enabling such interactions. As most of the IoT devices are limited in terms of processing power, available memory and battery lifetime, one of the most important aspects is the efficient data transfer from the devices to the server side. This paper addresses the performance of embedded web services through evaluation of XML compact binary representation. Evaluation is based on comparative analysis of speed, memory and battery consumption for XML and Protobuf formats. Preliminary results show that the Protobuf significantly exceeds the XML in every aspect of conducted measures.
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Performance Evaluation of Compact Binary XML
Representation for Constrained Devices
Nenad Gligorić, Igor Dejanović, Srđan Krčo
Ericsson
Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) envisages an environment in
which a huge number of heterogeneous devices will interact,
collaborate and provide information to users or execute actuation
commands based on the users’ instructions. Web services are
seen as one of the most promising approaches for enabling such
interactions. As most of the IoT devices are limited in terms of
processing power, available memory and battery lifetime, one of
the most important aspects is the efficient data transfer from the
devices to the server side.
This paper addresses the performance of embedded web services
through evaluation of XML compact binary representation.
Evaluation is based on comparative analysis of speed, memory
and battery consumption for XML and Protobuf formats.
Preliminary results show that the Protobuf significantly exceeds
the XML in every aspect of conducted measures.
Keywords: Internet of Things; Embedded Web Services;
Protobuf; XML; Performance; Encoding
I.
I
NTRODUCTION
Internet of Things (IoT) provides a unified presence of
devices on Internet, enabling new forms of communication
between people and objects as well as between the objects
themselves, thus changing the perspective of the information
society. Addition of numerous heterogeneous devices on the
fringes of the current Internet will enable numerous new
applications, ranging from smart meters and personal health
monitoring to building automation and connected consumer
devices.
Efficient integration of such a large number of devices with
varying characteristics and capabilities is a complex task. The
current Internet interconnects a huge number of devices relying
on the web architecture and web services. Leveraging the
knowledge and experience of these technologies, a number of
activities is ongoing towards definition of embedded web
services suitable for the constrained environment like IoT [1].
Two key challenges being addressed are efficient web
application transfer protocol and efficient payload encoding.
REST (Representational State Transfer) style web services
[2] are an important part of this new concept enabling efficient
transfer of information between IoT devices and users, as well
as resource discovery and manipulation functionality without
additional load and storage requirements. The Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardization efforts are
ongoing to design CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol)
[3], a new lightweight version application protocol based on
the REST principles, suitable for use in the constrained
environments.
Another important challenge that has to be addressed is the
encoding of user payload. The overall goal is to find efficient
solution for constrained devices regarding their processing,
memory and battery requirements. The Extensible Markup
Language (XML) has been used for a long time for payload
encoding. It brought the benefits of portability, extensibility,
broad support by tools and libraries, and readability by people
as well as machines [4]. Nevertheless, embedded systems
rarely have enough memory and processing power to run an
XML parser. The verbosity of XML increases RAM usage,
bandwidth requirements, and operating costs [5] and therefore
is not suitable for use in IoT.
A possible alternative to XML is Efficient XML
Interchange (EXI) [6] approach that provides compact XML
encoding using regular grammars derived from XML Schema
constraints.
Recently, Protocol Buffers [7] have been introduced as a
way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible
format. In this paper, we evaluate the Protobuf as a possible
alternative for XML encoded messages in IoT.
The paper is organized as follows: In section II, the
previous work is described. The outline of Protocol Buffers
with XML comparison is given in section III. Section IV
provides system description, testing methodology and overall
measurements results. The evaluation of conducted
measurements is provided in Section V. Section VI concludes
the paper.
II. P
REVIOUS
W
ORK
A number of binary formats for representing XML
documents are available today. These emerged from the need
to reduce the bandwidth and memory usage. XML is either
encoded or used as a basis for creating binary encoded
messages, depending on end-user (device) capabilities.
Compression and difference encoding approaches can be
also used for reducing size of messages. As the run-time
difference encoding consumes a lot of resources for storing
message during the processing (mainly to compare skeleton
message and document differences [10]) it is not suitable for
embedded devices with only tens of kB RAM and ROM
available. Compression space gain for small messages (which
are characteristic for IoT systems) is usually minor or non-
HOBNET: Holistic Platform Design for Smart Buildings of the Future
Internet
existent and is further diminished by a significant processing
overhead and additional library requirement, thus making it not
suitable for application in IoT.
The Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) is a well-
known binary format used in telecommunication for decades.
The notation describes data structures for representing,
encoding, transmitting, and decoding data. Data structures
transfer syntax can be encoded using different encoding rules,
providing schema notation even for representing XML in
binary form - XER (XML Encoding Rules). However, the
complexity of ASN.1 implementation is high thus making it
difficult to use in constrained environment such as IoT.
In [12], Efficient XML Interchange (EXI), Wireless Binary
XML (WBXML) and Fast Infoset (FIS) are presented together
with their comparative analysis. The Fast Infoset uses ASN.1
encoding by mapping W3C XML Schema Definitions into
ASN.1. Therefore, FIS results can be considered as ASN.1
results. The measurement indicates that EXI represents XML
content much more efficiently than BXML and ASN.1. The
ASN.1 encoding of XML reduces size of messages similar to
the gzip compression, but with better processing performance.
The results of the ASN.1 and BXML are on average
equivalent.
Measurements conducted by the W3C [6] also show better
compactness and processing efficiency of EXI over ASN.1 in
the case of XML encoding. The tests are executed using Japex
framework [11], a simple tool for writing Java-based micro
benchmarks, encoding and decoding in stages using SAX API.
Performance benchmarks [12], [6] indicate that EXI is the
leading technology in the case of XML encoding, providing the
best performances for XML, fast and compact implementation
and reliable efficient encodings of event streams; it is human-
readable and error prone. Nevertheless, the payload XML
encoding techniques are still too demanding for constrained
devices.
In general, avoiding XML can result in even better
performance. In this case, a binary parser interface is
implemented, resulting in interaction of a client application
with a processor across a parser interface. This approach can be
achieved using raw binary encodings such as ASN.1, Google’s
Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) [7] and Apache Thrift [9].
These binary formats apply a schema to generate code for a
target language that is then used for encoding and decoding. A
key difference between them are the multiple encodings that
ASN.1 supports, and its debugging and implementation
complexity: ASN.1 demands external (third-party) tool for
reading encoded message, and it is more complex to deploy.
Protobuf has some built-in features, i.e. toString() method that
returns human-readable representation of message.
Therefore, Protobuf is easier to implement and debug and
this can be the key features that can leverage this format,
especially for plug’n’play deployment scenarios. In order to
evaluate Protobuf’s performance, it has been tested as a
replacement for XML based communication used in the
EcoBus system, a mobile environment monitoring system [13].
TABLE I. C
OMPARISION OF BINARY FORMATS
Binary formats
ASN.1 Thrift Protobuf
Licence
Open source Open source Open source
Language
compatibility Java, C++, C,
Python... C++, Java,
Python, PHP Java, C++,
Python
Parsing speed Fast Medium Fast
Memory usage Low Medium Medium
Debugging
complexity High Low Medium
Implementation Medium Medium Low
Documentation Very good Less than
good Very good
III. P
ROTOCOL
B
UFFERS
The Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) were initially developed at
Google to address the problem of large number of requests and
responses to/from the index server. This protocol uses binary
encoding which makes serialized data more compact. Google
exploits Protobuf for almost all internal RPC, so it is well
tested and stable. The supported programming languages are
Java, C++, Python and there are many third party
implementations for other languages [7].
In order to serialize data, data structures have to be
described in a .proto file and compiled. The compilation
process produces classes for representing those structures in a
selected language. Afterwards, the API can be used for writing
and reading messages, in respect to the compiled classes. When
a message is encoded, the keys and values pair is concatenated
into a byte stream. Every Protobuf message field has a unique
number and can be defined as optional or required providing a
certain degree of flexibility.
A. XML vs Protobuf
The primary advantage of the Protobuf is that it encodes
values before the transmission using varints - a method of
serializing integers via one or more bytes. Therefore, the XML
messages are significantly larger as they employ UTF-8
encoding. In addition, every XML field is enveloped with a tag
making it verbose and redundant. The Protobuf messages are
not human-readable after encoding, i.e. during the transfer,
when the message is being sent over the wire.
XML parsers process data arbitrarily and perform additional
tests to detect poorly formatted data or syntax errors. This can
cause additional overhead for the devices executing this,
particularly in the embedded systems [5]. The Protocol Buffers
integrates data structure at a lower level during compilation of
a .proto file, thus allowing faster serialization. The XML nested
elements can be mapped into a Protobuf representation due the
support for message type’s nested inside other messages. The
embedded web services can use both formats (XML or
Protobuf) to address heterogeneity between systems.
IV. E
COBUS
C
ASE
S
TUDY
A. System descriptions
The EcoBus system has been developed in the FP7 SENSEI
project [14]. It utilizes public transportation vehicles to
continuously monitor a set of environmental parameters over a
large urban area as well as to provide an insight into position of
vehicles in time and space.
The IoT nodes are deployed on top of the public buses
providing gas measurements (CO, CO2, NO2), weather
measurement (temperature, air pressure, humidity), and
location (GPS). The measurements are sent over a mobile
network interface (GPRS). The nodes continuously observe
these parameters as well as events and activities in the physical
world (e.g. average speed). All measurements are transferred to
a central database using Telit GPRS/GPS module as an end-
point. These modules are using built-in interface dedicated to
the communication between the Python script and the module
functionality.
The end users can query the system using a web or mobile
Android application to get real time gas measurements as well
as locations of the public transportation vehicles. Locations of
the buses together with the estimated time of a bus arrival into
a selected station can be retrieved by SMS and/or USSD query.
B. Testing methodology
The main goal was to perform testing under the conditions
that will closely match those of the deployed system. The tests
were written in Java programming language and were executed
on an Android powered mobile device. The testing involved
parsing of the message presented in Figure 1 (XML version
presented; Protobuf version is not in a human readable format).
The tests were not performed on the devices used in the Ecobus
system as there was no software support for the Protobuf
implementation on the devices.
Four tests were performed:
1. Raw parsing time test
2. Network&Parsing time test
3. Network&Parsing memory test
4. Network&Parsing battery test.
In the first test, the message parsing time was measured. In
order to avoid impact of the I/O operations on the
measurements, the messages were buffered before parsing. In
tests 2-4, messages were first fetched from a remote server over
a wireless network and Internet, and then parsed and finally
corresponding Java objects required by the application created.
This procedure was followed in all 3 test cases, but the value
measured was different. In Test 2, the average operation time
has been measured. Test 3 was focused on measurement of the
heap memory usage, while Test 4 was used to evaluate impact
of message processing on battery consumption.
To achieve better accuracy, each test consisted of multiple
repeats of the operation whose performances has been
measured (for example, Test 1 consisted of multiple repeats of
parsing, while Tests 2-4 consisted of multiple repeats of the
message fetching and parsing).
In Tests 1-3, operations were repeated 100 times. The
average times per operation were calculated at the end of the
each test run in tests 1 and 2, while for the memory
consumption test (Test 3), the average memory consumption
per operation was calculated. For Test 4, the total battery drain
for 30,000 operation repeats is used as the result of the test.
Each test has been done 30 times per message type,
altering between the types, i.e. for the Test 1, for the first test
run an XML message was parsed 100 times, then in the second
test run Protobuf message was parsed 100 times, than again
XML message and so on. This approach was used to reduce
temporal factors of each concrete test run (e.g. background
processes that utilize CPU resources or network congestion at
particular time of the day).
The heap memory utilization in Test 3 was measured using
standard Java API calls after an aggressive garbage collection
was executed. It responds to HTTP GET requests by returning
the test XML or Protobuf messages. The length of the URLs
used on the server side is the same in both cases in order to
ensure the same network protocol headers length.
Gathered results have been processed by the R, a statistical
tool [8]. The mean value and the standard deviation have been
calculated for each sample. Statistical significance of
differences between the means of the XML and Protobuf
samples has been tested using independent samples T-test
where the null hypothesis is that the means values for both
XML and Protobuf are the same. For normality testing the
Shapiro-Wilk test was used.
Figure 1. XML EcoBus message
C. Test results
In the following tables, the results of executed tests are
given. In Table II, the times required for parsing XML and the
corresponding Protobuf messages are given.
TABLE II. R
AW
P
ARSING
T
EST
Time
XML [ms]
Protobuf [ms]
Mean
31.91
0.82
SD
0.785
0.142
-
Test
t
= 213.494
P
< 0.01
In Table III, the times required for fetching and parsing an
XML and the corresponding Protobuf messages are provided.
TABLE III. N
ETWORK
&P
ARSING TIME TEST
Time
XML [ms]
Protobuf [ms]
Mean
98.03
65.05
SD
2.454
0.9
-
Test
t
=
69.073
P
<0.01
Table IV summarizes the memory utilization for fetching
and parsing XML and the corresponding Protobuf messages.
TABLE IV. N
ETWORK
&P
ARSING MEMORY TEST
Heap mem
ory usage
XML [byte]
Protobuf [byte]
Mean
3,360,391
3,350,549
SD
14,522
10,102
-
Test
t
=
3.048
P
<
0.01
In Table V, the percentage of battery reduction due to the
fetching and parsing of 30,000 XML and the corresponding
Protobuf messages is given.
TABLE V. N
ETWORK
&P
ARSING BATTERY TEST
Power consumption
XML [%]
Protobuf [%]
Mean
18.53
15.87
SD
1.548
1.106
-
Test
t
=
7.678
P
<0.01
V. E
VALUATION
In section IV.C the overall results for XML and Protobuf
testing are presented. In case of the pure parsing performance,
the Protobuf outperforms XML by an order of magnitude (see
Table II above). In a more realistic Test 2 where I/O network
operations were involved (see Table III) the differences are not
that large but are still significant. These differences are caused
by not only faster parsing time, but because of the shorter
Protobuf messages that are transferred more quickly over the
network. In the EcoBus system, the XML tags are shortened
for efficiency reason (Figure 1), i.e. to reduce the memory
requirements of the IoT nodes handling the messages. Even
with such a reduced format the XML message is 3 times bigger
than its Protobuf representation.
The heap memory utilization results (Table IV) indicate
that on average the Protobuf uses roughly 10Kb of heap
memory less than XML messages. Despite our efforts to force
garbage collection before a memory consumption
measurement, the standard deviation is larger than expected.
We believe that this is a consequence of the way Java Virtual
Machine memory management uses automatic garbage
collection (it can be requested by a standard API, but is not
guaranteed that it will be actually run).
Nevertheless, there is a statistically significant difference
(P<0.01) between the XML and the Protobuf tests which shows
that Protobuf parser uses memory more efficiently than XML
parser.
Power consumption in Test 4 is in line with Test 2 which is
expected. Shorter messages and less processing overhead leads
to reduced CPU and wireless network usage and better power
utilization. Power consumption was about 15% smaller when
Protocol Buffer was used.
Overall, better results were obtained when using Protobuf
format. This practically means that it is possible to extend the
lifetime of an embedded device if Protobuf format is used in
comparison to standard XML.
In the case of the EcoBus system, devices are sending
updates to the central server approximately every 15s. As each
message is 256 bytes large (XML formatted), it means that one
device generates and transfers 2,449,680 bytes during a day. If
we would replace XML messages with the Protobuf, the total
amount of bytes per device per day would be reduced to
662,400 bytes which represents a significant reduction
resulting in shorter transfer times, reduced cost of running the
system. It would also mean longer lifetime of the each device if
these were battery driven (in the current EcoBus system, all
devices are connected to the vehicles’ battery).
VI. C
ONCLUSION AND
F
UTURE
W
ORK
The IoT domain evolution is accelerating, providing
intelligence to the fringes of Internet. Smart devices are
becoming smaller, cheaper and ubiquitous enabling a range of
new applications and services. In order to make this evolution
sustainable, one of the key challenges is simplification of the
algorithms used thus reduction of the complexity of the devices
and consequently their cost and energy consumption.
The main differentiation point between the embedded and
standard web services is exactly related to this simplification.
Due to the limited power, computation and memory resources
available, the embedded web services protocols have to be as
efficient as possible in terms of the message sizes and
implementation complexity. Therefore, many different lifetime
maximization approaches for IoT nodes are considered. In this
paper, a compact binary XML representation for constrained
devices was evaluated; i.e. the Protocol Buffers (Protobuf)
format as a replacement for XML has been evaluated in order
to compare performances. The benchmark indicates that the
Protobuf maximizes energy gains by reducing parsing time and
data overhead in respect to the compact binary encoding and
faster serialization. In addition, usage of the Protobuf can
conserve bandwidth for constrained devices due the efficient
payload encoding.
The GPRS/GPS modules in Ecobus platform are running
older version of Python that is not compatible with the
Protobuf. These modules demand message formats that are
easy to parse. In future work, the CoAP protocol [3] will be
considered as a possible end-point deployment for GPRS/GPS
modules for resources manipulation, as well as the CoRE Link
Format [15] for the resource lookup.
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EFERENCES
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The Internet of Things (IoT) is the set of systems that enable sensors and actuators to be connected to the Internet. It is estimated that there are already more IoT devices than humans, and that by 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices. A re- view of related literature outlines concerns regarding security and privacy of the IoT, demonstrating that IoT devices are creating the opportunity to infringe on security and privacy in numerous ways. One significant challenge is to manage the identity of IoT devices in an effective way. Many IoT systems are built using middleware sys- tems. The main research question of this thesis is whether an improved model for IoT middleware systems — based around federated identity — can provide significant improvements to security and privacy while maintaining reasonable costs in terms of user experience and performance. In a review of related work, a matrix of IoT threats is presented and from this a number of requirements are identified. A structured survey of literature around IoT middleware systems and platforms identifies 20 systems which are evaluated against those requirements. From this, a set of gaps in IoT middleware systems are identified. This work addresses a number of these gaps in a novel approach for linking IoT de- vices to cloud and web systems. A proposed architecture supports an integrated set of privacy preserving controls based on federated identity and access management patterns. In particular, a model introduces device and user registration processes that are adapted to support constrained IoT devices. Federation and de-coupling of systems are incorporated to allow choice of where data is shared with the result that users can choose to avoid sharing data with systems that may infringe privacy. Users are automatically provisioned with a cloud service that manages their devices and data. Summarisation and filtering of data are incorporated to protect raw data and prevent fingerprinting attacks. A formal model of the approach is presented and properties are proved mathemat- ically, and these properties are used to inform a threat model of the system, which demonstrates benefits of the model in enhancing privacy and security. The model is implemented in a prototype system and experimental results on this system are presented, including energy usage, cost, scalability and performance. The prototype demonstrates that the approach is both feasible and cost-effective. Perfor- mance data demonstrates that the impact on users of the approach is minimal and within norms for such systems. Finally, areas of further research are presented.
... As an alternative to broker centric communications protocols and synchronization costly protocols such as REST [27], Google Inc. has adopted a RPC protocol and service discovery framework Stubby/Chubby [8]. The open source version of its tool is called GRPC [18], which relies on HTTP/2 in order to avoid handshake overhead, and Protocol Buffers [16] to communicate using a binary method, which provides better data compaction by reducing the message size. ...
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Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a disruptive innovation that not only promises to transform every aspect of human activity but is driving revolutions in many fields, including but not limited to: healthcare, finance, agriculture, quality control and retail. For communicating data between connected devices in IoT ecosystem, various data exchange formats are presently in use. Determining the appropriate data format for an application plays a pivotal role in order to ensure efficient communication and reducing overheads. The intent of this literature review is to document and analyse literature relating to data exchange formats. The paper contains a systematic review of several academic research papers focused on performance evaluation and comparison of data formats. We reviewed the predominant data formats used for the purpose of data interchange and discussed the strengths, weaknesses and suitable application areas for the same.
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Most solutions for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) come equipped with their own architectural concepts which raise the problem of possible incompatibility of computer networks and the WSN. Often gateway concepts are used to overcome this problem. But this is not the best solution on the long term. Other research fields and industrial domains are heading for universal cross domain architecture concepts based on internet technologies that are more mature and better understood. The IETF 6LoWPAN working group provides the groundings for standardized communication using existing network protocols like IPv6 also in low power radio networks. A big challenge when deploying further application layer network protocols on top of 6LoWPAN is the message size of existing mostly XML based protocols which does not meet the resource requirements of deeply embedded devices without further research efforts. This paper presents different data compression techniques for the Devices Profile of Web Services (DPWS) to be applied in 6LoWPAN networks. Therefore, we analyze a realistic scenario. We determined 18 message types in the scenario and compressed and encoded all messages by using existing schemes and tools. For the first time, we also investigate on the Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format for DPWS.
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The Internet of Things is the next big possibility and challenge for the Internet. Extending the web architecture to this new domain of constrained wireless networks and devices will be key to achieving the flexibility and scalability needed to make it a success. Web services have proven to be indispensable in creating interoperable communications between machines on today¿s Internet, but at the same time the overhead and complexity of web service technology such as SOAP, XML, and HTTP are too high for use in the constrained environments often found in machine-to-machine applications (e.g., energy monitoring, building automation, and asset management). This article first gives an overview of the web architecture, its core REST concepts, and the current state of the art in web services. Two key activities required in order to achieve efficient embedded web services are introduced: a fresh approach to a web application transfer protocol and efficient payload encoding. The article analyzes the most promising payload encoding techniques and introduces the new IETF Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE) standardization activity.
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One of the critical challenges in embedded sensor actor networks is the communication between the diversity of widespread nodes. XML-based message formats are already widely adopted in other IT domains such as the Web and would be perfectly suited for data exchange in heterogeneous environments. Despite all its strengths, the common markup language cannot be adopted on small embedded devices with limited resources due to its verbosity and associated processing overhead. The paper describes an innovative source code generation technique by means of W3C's Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format that enables the efficient usage of XML-based messages on small devices with limited resources. The outcome is an EXI Processor that allows an end-to-end XML-based communication between systems ranging from powerful workstations to microcontroller-based systems. Particularly, the paper emphasizes the flexibility with regard to alter an exchange format and its minimal adaption efforts due to the generated EXI Processor. An example application proves the applicability of the proposed approach and demonstrates a real life show-case for XML-based Web service communication on microcontroller-based devices.
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In this paper, the ecoBus system, a smart city service built according to the FP7 SENSEI architecture design is described.
Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)," draft-ietf-core-coap-06
  • Z Shelby
  • K Hartke
  • C Bormann
  • B Frank
Z. Shelby, K. Hartke, C. Bormann and B. Frank, "Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)," draft-ietf-core-coap-06, work in progress, May 2011.
Google's Data Interchange FormatDocumentation and open source release
  • Google Protocol Buffers
Efficient XML Interchange Evaluation
  • C Bournez
C. Bournez, "Efficient XML Interchange Evaluation," http://www.w3.org/TR/exi-evaluation/, W3C Working Draft 7 April 2009.
CoRE Link Format," draft-ietf-core-link-format-05, work in progress
  • Z Shelby
Z. Shelby, "CoRE Link Format," draft-ietf-core-link-format-05, work in progress, May 2011.