An Efficient B-tree Implementation for Memory-Constrained Embedded Systems

Embedded devices collect and process significant amounts of data in a variety of applications including environmental monitoring, industrial automation and control, and other Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Storing data efficiently is critically important, especially when the device must perform local processing on the data. The most widely used data structure for high performance query and insert is the B-tree. However, existing implementations consume too much memory for small embedded devices and often rely on operating system support. This work presents an extremely memory efficient implementation of B-trees for embedded devices that functions on the smallest devices and does not require an operating system. Experimental results demonstrate that the B-tree implementation can run on devices with as little as 4 KB of RAM while efficiently processing thousands of records.Comment: Published in the 19th International Conference on Embedded Systems, Cyber-physical Systems, and Applications (ESCS'21). Code is available at https://github.com/ubco-d