Serialization for Ubiquitous Systems: An Evaluation of High Performance Techniques on Java Micro Edition

Object marshaling, called Serialization in Java, offers a high level of abstraction for information interchange in object oriented systems. It thus reduces the source lines of code required to transmit objects across a network. This abstraction often comes with a runtime and data penalty. In this paper we present an efficient implementation of object marshaling for the Java platform originally used for high performance computing environments. We demonstrate that the same technique is effective on ubiquitous resource constrained platforms, such as Java Micro Edition. We show that by adopting high performance techniques we are able to bring object marshaling to a platform where it is not otherwise possible due to the lack of runtime type inspection. We also demonstrate that performance of this system is better for array oriented data and acceptable for typical application data when compared with a hand coded protocol. This demonstrates the value of bringing techniques from high performance computing to ubiquitous resource constrained devices.