A comparative study on operating system for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been the subject of intensive research over the last years. WSNs consist of a large number of sensor nodes, and are used for various applications such as building monitoring, environment control, wild-life habitat monitoring, forest fire detection, industry automation, military, security, and healthcare. Operating system (OS) support for WSNs plays a central role in building scalable distributed applications that are efficient and reliable. Over the years, we have seen a variety of operating systems (OSes) emerging in the sensor network community to facilitate developing WSN applications. In this paper, we present OS for WSNs. We begin by presenting the major issues for the design of OS for WSNs. Then, we examine some existing OSes for WSNs, including TinyOS, Contiki, and LiteOS. Finally, we present a comparison of these OSes by examining some important OS features. We believe that our work will help both OS developers and OS users. With OS developers, they will know what has worked in previous OSes and what has not. With OS users, they know the features of existing sensor network OSes, so they can select a sensor network OS that is the most appropriate for their application.