At the ScaleSys Workshop co-located with the IoT 2025 Conference, held from 18–21 November in Vienna, Austria, the paper “WebAssembly on Resource-Constrained IoT Devices: Performance, Efficiency, and Portability” was presented by Mislav Has.
The paper is authored by Mislav Has, Tao Xiong, Fehmi Ben Abdesslem, and Mario Kušek. The work results from a collaboration with RISE, focusing on the experimental evaluation of WebAssembly technologies for deployment on highly resource-constrained IoT devices.
The paper investigates the feasibility and practical implications of running WebAssembly (WASM) on such constrained platforms. It provides an in-depth experimental evaluation of lightweight WASM runtimes on microcontrollers with only kilobytes of RAM, focusing on trade-offs between performance, memory usage, energy efficiency, and portability. The study compares WASM execution with native C implementations for representative IoT workloads, offering insights into when WASM is a viable alternative and when native code remains necessary.