Design consideration for ultra low energy wireless micro sensor nodes.

IEEE transaction on computer, vol54, no-6, june 2005 Operating system s for wireless sensor networks: a survey In this paper Comparison is done based on the OS architecture, programming model, scheduling, memory management and protection, communication protocols, resource sharing, support for real time application and additional features. The main and most critical resources for the WSNs are the energy (generally provided by the battery and very limited memory with often allows storage up to few kilobytes. The OS act as the resource manager for complex systems. Typical system resources are processor, memories, timers, disks, keyboard, network interfaces etc. OS job is to manage and allocate these resources to application depending upon requirement. OS multiplexes the resources in two ways time and space. Time sharing multiplexes the resource in such a way that time frame is fixed for each resource. In space multiplexing involves the accessing of parts of resource by different programs, possible at same time. Major concerns in the OS design:1) Architecture:- Architecture of OS decides the size of kernel and also influence the way by which it provide service to application routines. Some well known architectures are monolithic architecture, microkernel architecture, the virtual machine architecture and layered architecture. Monolithic kernel architecture:- in this architecture all the OS layers are in kernel space and it does not has any structure. Services provided by an OS are implemented separately and each service provides interface for other services. This architecture support the bundling of of all required service together into single system image, thus result into small memory foot print. OS for WSNs should have small kernel size and hence smaller memory footprint. Kernel has to flexible for improvement or adding new services. 2) Programming Model:- event based programming and multithreaded programming 3) Scheduling:- depends upon the application. For real time application RT scheduler is required. 4) Memory management and protection:- Static or dynamic memory management. Early OS like Tiny OS there was no memory management available. It is assumed that only a single application executes on the sensor mote hence no need of memory protection. 5) Communication protocol support:- All WSN OS provides API that enable application program to communicate. For communication between motes OS must provide transport, network, MAC layer. 6) Resource Sharing:Examples of OS used in WSN:Tiny OS:-