Experiences from porting the Contiki operating system to a popular hardware platform

In contrast to original belief, recent work has demonstrated the viability of IPv6-based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This has led to significant research and standardization efforts with outcomes such as the “IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks” (6LoWPAN) specification. The Contiki embedded operating system is an important open source, multi-platform effort to implement 6LoWPAN functionality for constrained devices. Alongside its RFC-compliant TCP/IP stack (uIP), it provides support for 6LoWPAN and many related standards. As part of our work, we have made considerable fixes and enhancements to one of Contiki's ports. In the process, we made significant optimizations and a thorough evaluation of Contiki's memory and code footprint characteristics, focusing on network-related functionality. In this paper we present our experiences from the porting process, we disclose our optimizations and demonstrate their significance. Lastly, we discuss a method of using Contiki to deploy an embedded Internet-to-6LoWPAN router. Our porting work has been made available to the community under the terms of the Contiki license.