A new AIoTwin blog post is now available, presenting recent research on running WebAssembly (WASM) on resource-constrained IoT devices. The article explores the practical limits, trade-offs, and opportunities of using WASM on microcontrollers with kilobytes of RAM, highlighting how lightweight runtimes can provide portability and sandboxed execution while balancing energy, memory, and performance constraints.
Key topics covered in the blog post include:
- Benchmarking two lightweight WASM runtimes (wasm3 and WAMR) on three microcontrollers: Raspberry Pi Pico, ESP32-C6, and Nordic nRF5340
- Measuring execution time, memory footprint, and energy consumption
- Comparing WASM execution with native C for typical IoT workloads (bubble sort and CRC-16)
- Trade-offs between performance, portability, and sandboxing in constrained devices
- Insights into runtime selection for modular, cross-platform IoT applications
Authored by Mislav Has, the blogpost explains how WASM can simplify cross-platform deployment, enable secure execution of dynamic modules, and support unified toolchains, while highlighting scenarios where native code remains essential for performance-critical or ultra-low-power tasks.
We are also pleased to announce that this work, titled “WebAssembly on Resource-Constrained IoT Devices: Performance, Efficiency, and Portability,” was presented at the ScaleSys workshop within the IoT 2025 conference. More details on the technical implementation, results, and evaluation scenarios can be found in the article here.
Read the full blog post [here].