RETOS: resilient, expandable, and threaded operating system for wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the design principles, implementation, and evaluation of the RETOS operating system which is specifically developed for micro sensor nodes. RETOS has four distinct objectives, which are to provide (1) a multithreaded programming interface, (2) system resiliency, (3) kernel extensibility with dynamic reconfiguration, and (4) WSN-oriented network abstraction. RETOS is a multithreaded operating system, hence it provides the commonly used thread model of programming interface to developers. We have used various implementation techniques to optimize the performance and resource usage of multithreading. RETOS also provides software solutions to separate kernel from user applications, and supports their robust execution on MMU-less hardware. The RETOS kernel can be dynamically reconfigured, via loadable kernel framework, so a application-optimized and resource-efficient kernel is constructed. Finally, the networking architecture in RETOS is designed with a layering concept to provide WSN-specific network abstraction. RETOS currently supports Atmel ATmega128, TI MSP430, and Chipcon CC2430 family of microcontrollers. Several real-world WSN applications are developed for RETOS and the overall evaluation of the systems is described in the paper.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jason Hill , Robert Szewczyk , Alec Woo , Seth Hollar , David Culler , Kristofer Pister, System architecture directions for networked sensors, Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.93-104, November 2000, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• 2: Chih-Chieh Han , Ram Kumar , Roy Shea , Eddie Kohler , Mani Srivastava, A dynamic operating system for sensor nodes, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, June 06-08, 2005, Seattle, Washington [doi>10.1145/1067170.1067188]
• 3: A. Dunkels, B. Grönvall, T. Voigt, "Contiki - a Lightweight and Flexible Operating System for Tiny Networked Sensors," In Proc. of the First IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNets), Tampa, Florida, November 2004.
• 4: Shah Bhatti , James Carlson , Hui Dai , Jing Deng , Jeff Rose , Anmol Sheth , Brian Shucker , Charles Gruenwald , Adam Torgerson , Richard Han, MANTIS OS: an embedded multithreaded operating system for wireless micro sensor platforms, Mobile Networks and Applications, v.10 n.4, p.563-579, August 2005 [doi>10.1145/1160162.1160178]
• 5: Lin Gu , John A. Stankovic, t-kernel: providing reliable OS support to wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, October 31-November 03, 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA [doi>10.1145/1182807.1182809]
• 6: R. Kumar, S. PalChaudhuri, D. Johnson, U. Ramachandran, "Network Stack Architecture for Future Sensors," Rice University, Computer Science, Technical Report, TR04-447.
• 7: Tmote Sky, http://www.moteiv.com.
• 8: MicaZ, http://www.xbow.com.
• 9: CC2430, http://www.chipcon.com.
• 10: Hyoseung Kim , Hojung Cha, Towards a resilient operating system for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the Annual Technical Conference on USENIX'06 Annual Technical Conference, p.10-10, May 30-June 03, 2006, Boston, MA
• 11: H. Kim, H. Cha, "Multithreading Optimization Techniques for Sensor Network Operating Systems," In Proc. of the 4th European conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN), Delft, Netherlands, January 2007.
• 12: Rob von Behren , Jeremy Condit , Eric Brewer, Why events are a bad idea (for high-concurrency servers), Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, p.4-4, May 18-21, 2003, Lihue, Hawaii
• 13: POSIX 1003.1B, http://www.unix.org/version3.
• 14: H. Shin, H. Cha, "Supporting Application-Oriented Kernel Functionality for Resource Constrained Wireless Sensor Nodes," In Proc. of the 2nd International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (MSN 2006), Hong Kong, China, December 2006.
• 15: S. Choi, H. Cha, "Application-Centric Networking Framework for Wireless Sensor Nodes," In Proc. of the 3rd Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (MOBIQUITOUS), San Jose, California, July 2006.
• 16: I. Jung, H. Cha, "RMTool: Component-Based Network Management System for Wireless Sensor Networks," In Proc. of the 2007 IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, January 2007.
• 17: S. Yi, H. Cha, "Active Tracking System using IEEE 802.15.4-based Ultrasonic Sensor Devices," In Proc. of the 2nd International Workshop on RFID and Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN), Seoul, Korea, August 2006.
• 18: Younghwa Lee , Hojung Cha, A Light-weight and Scalable Localization Technique Using Mobile Acoustic Source, Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT'06), p.235, September 20-22, 2006 [doi>10.1109/CIT.2006.10]
• 19: Miklós Maróti , Branislav Kusy , Gyula Simon , Ákos Lédeczi, The flooding time synchronization protocol, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 03-05, 2004, Baltimore, MD, USA [doi>10.1145/1031495.1031501]
• 20: Y. You, H. Cha, "Scalable and Low-Cost Acoustic Source Localization for Wireless Sensor Networks," In Proc. of the 3rd International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC), Wuhan and Three Gorges, China, September 2006.
• 21: Y. Sung, H. Cha, "Parametric Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks," In Proc. of the 2006 International Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing Systems (UCS), Seoul, Korea, October 2006.
• 22: David Gay , Philip Levis , Robert von Behren , Matt Welsh , Eric Brewer , David Culler, The nesC language: A holistic approach to networked embedded systems, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 09-11, 2003, San Diego, California, USA
• 23: R. Kumar, E. Kohler, M. Srivastava, "Software-Based Memory Protection In Sensor Nodes," In Proc. of the Third Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNets), Cambridge, MA, 2006.
• 24: Robert Wahbe , Steven Lucco , Thomas E. Anderson , Susan L. Graham, Efficient software-based fault isolation, Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.203-216, December 05-08, 1993, Asheville, North Carolina, United States
• 25: Adam Dunkels , Niclas Finne , Joakim Eriksson , Thiemo Voigt, Run-time dynamic linking for reprogramming wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, October 31-November 03, 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA [doi>10.1145/1182807.1182810]
• 26: Adam Dunkels , Oliver Schmidt , Thiemo Voigt , Muneeb Ali, Protothreads: simplifying event-driven programming of memory-constrained embedded systems, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, October 31-November 03, 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA [doi>10.1145/1182807.1182811]
• 27: W. Ye, J. Heidemann, D. Estrin, "A Flexible and Reliable Radio Communication Stack on Motes," USC/ISI Technical Report ISI-TR-565.
• 28: Adam Dunkels, Full TCP/IP for 8-bit architectures, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, p.85-98, May 05-08, 2003, San Francisco, California [doi>10.1145/1066116.1066118]
• 29: Joseph Polastre , Jonathan Hui , Philip Levis , Jerry Zhao , David Culler , Scott Shenker , Ion Stoica, A unifying link abstraction for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 02-04, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1098918.1098928]
• 30: Mote-View, http://www.xbow.com.
• 31: G. Tolle, D. Culler, "Design of an Application-Cooperative Management System for Wireless Sensor Networks," In Proc. of the 2nd European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN), Istanbul, Turkey, January 2005.
• 32: P. J. Marrón, A. Lachenmann, D. Minder, J. Hähner, R. Sauter, K. Rothermel, "TinyCubus: A Flexible and Adaptive Framework for Sensor Networks," In Proc. of the 2nd European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks, Istanbul, Turkey, January 2005.
• 33: Nithya Ramanathan , Kevin Chang , Rahul Kapur , Lewis Girod , Eddie Kohler , Deborah Estrin, Sympathy for the sensor network debugger, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 02-04, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1098918.1098946]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.7 Organization and Design

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
multithreading, operating systems, wireless sensor network