Measuring the responsiveness of WebAssembly in edge network applications

Sammanfattning: Edge computing facilitates applications of cyber-physical systems that require low latencies by moving compute and storage resources closer to the end application. Whilst the edge network benefits such systems in terms of responsiveness, it increases the systems’ complexity due to edge devices’ often heterogeneous and resource-constrained nature. In this work, we evaluate whether WebAssembly can be used as a lightweight and portable abstraction layer for such applications. Through the implementation of an edge network robot control scenario, we benchmark and compare the performance of WebAssembly against its native equivalent. We measure WebAssembly’s overhead and assess the impact of different placement options in the network. We further compare the overall application responsiveness against the latency requirements of an industrial application to evaluate its performance. We find that WebAssembly satisfies the portability and performance requirements of the selected industrial use case. Our empirical results show that WebAssembly doubles the execution latency in a localized setting, but does not excessively impact the overall responsiveness of a cyber-physical system.