Is it possible to Develop ASN.1 protocol in Embedded c for 32-bit microcontroller (without OS)?

Question

Is it possible to Develop ASN.1 protocol in Embedded c for 32-bit microcontroller (without OS) ?

I am using ARM micro(32-bit) and cubesuite compiler.

Answer 1

Maasi,

It's certainly possible: ASN.1 standardizes both protocol notation syntax (X.680-X.683) and encodings (X.690-X.696). Specifications are freely available at ITU-T, although this list appears to be missing the Octet Encoding Rules (X.696).

Is it practical? This is a little more questionable. If you're writing your own protocol, you have the freedom to design something that can be implemented in hardware or firmware without the use of external tools. On the other hand, supporting current standards (e.g., LTE) is harder: the protocols are quite complex.

If you have this design freedom, you may find that non-ASN.1 options could be easier to implement. One of the main virtues of ASN.1 is that tool support exists for generating APIs. The encoding rules are otherwise complex enough that implementing by hand is likely to be quite error prone.

Answer 2

You can try the tiny-asn1 library. It can parse and encode ASN.1 data, does not use any malloc and is targetted for embedded platforms.