SPLIT: Smart Protocol Loading for the IoT

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) permeates our everyday life, e.g., in the area of health monitoring, wearables, industry, and home automation. It comprises devices that provide only limited resources, operate in challenging network conditions, and are often battery-powered. To embed these devices into the Internet, they are envisioned to operate standard protocols. Yet, these protocols occupy the majority of limited program memory resources. Thus, devices can neither add application logic nor apply security updates or adopt optimizations for efficiency. This problem will further exacerbate in the future as the further ongoing permeation of smart devices in our environment demands for more and more functionality. To overcome limited functionality due to resource constraints, we show that not all functionality is required in parallel, and thus can be SPLIT in a feasible manner. This enables on-demand loading of functionality outsourced as (multiple) modules to the significantly lesser constrained flash storage of devices. We exemplify efficient modularization of DTLS and show that SPLIT enables operation of large protocol stacks while it incurs reasonable, tunable performance trade-offs. Our use case specific results show an initial runtime overhead of 23.34 % and 4.9 % for subsequent protocol executions.