An efficient embedded Web server for Web-based network element management

An embedded Web server (EWS) is a Web server that runs on an embedded system with limited computing resources and serves embedded Web documents to a Web browser. By embedding a Web server into a network device, it is possible for an EWS to provide a powerful Web-based management user interface constructed using HTML, graphics and other features common to Web browsers. When applied to embedded systems, Web technologies offer graphical user interfaces which are user-friendly, inexpensive, cross-platform, and network-ready. This paper explores the topic of an efficient and lightweight embedded Web server for Web-based network element management. We present the architecture of an embedded Web server that can provide a simple but powerful API. We also present the design and implementation of POS-EWS, which is an embedded Web server that we have developed for Web-based network element management. As well, we present the results of POS-EWS's performance evaluation and EWS optimization methods in a commercial Internet router.