The Design of a Lightweight Portable Operating System for Tiny Networked Sensor Devices

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are composed of large numbers of tiny networked devices that communicate untethered. In this paper we present the design of Contiki, a lightweight and portable operating system for such tiny devices. In this work, we try to find the right operating system abstractions that enable dynamic and efficient operation of a system with severe limitations. Contiki is built around a lightweight event scheduler and provides suitable abstractions for dynamic loading of programs, device drivers, and run-time linking of libraries. The system is highly portable and the kernel can be ported without changing a single line of code (except device drivers). We show how higher level abstractions such as multi-threading can be implemented as libraries on top of the lightweight event kernel.