Improving the performance of Web Services in wireless sensor networks

Due to extensive use of large XML messages in Web Service technologies, efficient use of existing Web Service solutions in wireless sensor networks faces major challenges. Wireless sensor network notoriously suffer from limited resources. Transmitting and processing large XML messages in wireless sensor networks can not only flood the bandwidth limited wireless sensor networks but also drain the limited battery of sensor nodes. In this paper we address this problem by 1) employing binary encoding technique to mitigate the overhead imposed by the bulky text-based XML messages, and 2) Web Service addressing schema, called “Efficient Web Service Addressing” (EWSA), is introduced which, when employed, can drastically reduce size of Web Service messages. In order to evaluate impact of the proposed solution, we have applied them to WS-Discovery protocol. Performance of WS-Discovery, binary encoding and the proposed EWSA is evaluated by computer based simulation. The presented simulation results show that by employing the proposed solution, average size of the Web Services messages can be significantly reduced to almost 6 percent of its original size. The work presented in this paper demonstrates that by applying the proposed techniques, Web services technologies can be adapted and efficiently deployed in resource limited wireless sensor networks.