A compact hard real-time operating system for wireless sensor nodes

The paper shows a compact hard real-time operating system for wireless sensor nodes called PAVENET OS. PAVENET OS provides hybrid multithreading: preemptive multithreading and cooperative multithreading. Both of the multithreading is optimized for two kinds of task on wireless sensor networks, and the kinds are real-time tasks and best-effort tasks. PAVENET OS can efficiently perform hard real-time tasks that cannot be performed by TinyOS. The paper demonstrates the hybrid multithreading realizes compactness and low overhead, which are comparable to those of TinyOS, through quantitative evaluation. The results show PAVENET OS performs 100-Hz sensor sampling with 0.01% jitter while performing wireless communication tasks, whereas optimized TinyOS has 0.62% jitter. In addition, PAVENET OS has a small footprint and low overhead (minimum RAM size: 29 bytes, minimum ROM size: 490 bytes, minimum task switch time: 23 cycles).