Comparison of IoT Constrained Devices Operating Systems: A Survey

As it refers to the ever-growing network of physical objects that feature an IP address for internet connectivity, the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming very challenging for research community and domain. Operating systems for IoT devices play a vital role in this regard. These low-end devices can not use traditional operating system (OS) such as Windows or Linux due to stringent resource constraints. A lot of efforts have been made to design operating systems for these concerned devices. The main contribution of the paper is the comparative study of the most recent operating systems for low-end IoT devices. The comparison will focus on the major OS keys as architecture, scheduling, real-time capabilities, programming model, memory footprint, network connectivity, hardware support and energy efficiency. We highlight these OS keys values at the selected OSs: FreeRTOS, Mbed, Contiki, TinyOS and RIOT.