Micro T-Kernel: A Low Power and Small Footprint RTOS for Networked Tiny Devices

This paper proposes micro muT-Kernel, a real-time operating system for networked tiny devices, which adopts a preemptive priority-based scheduling. It provides a sophisticated application programming interface to facilitate software development. In addition, to provide rich functionalities with a small-footprint, the kernel is reconfigurable with respect to the API. Moreover, muT-Kernel supports a power management which utilizes the periodicity of WSN applications. We conducted performance analyses of the memory footprint and energy consumption, and migrated sample applications to show the programmability of micro muT-Kernel. Our results show micro muT-Kernel is effective for developing WSN systems while realizing a kernel small enough to fit into a resource-constrained node.