Versatile Stack Management for Multitasking Sensor Networks

The networked application environment has motivated the development of multitasking operating systems for sensor networks and other low-power electronic devices, but their multitasking capability is severely limited because traditional stack management techniques perform poorly on small memory systems. In this paper, we show that combining binary translation and a new kernel runtime can lead to efficient OS designs on resource-constrained platforms. We introduce SenSmart, a multitasking OS for sensor networks, and present new OS design techniques for supporting preemptive multi-task scheduling, memory isolation, and versatile stack management. We have implemented SenSmart on MICA2/MICAz motes. Evaluation shows that SenSmart performs efficient binary translation and demonstrates a significantly better capability in managing concurrent tasks than other sensor net operating systems.