MIROS: A Hybrid Real-Time Energy-Efficient Operating System for the Resource-Constrained Wireless Sensor Nodes

Abstract

Operating system (OS) technology is significant for the proliferation of the wireless sensor network (WSN). With an outstanding OS; the constrained WSN resources (processor; memory and energy) can be utilized efficiently. Moreover; the user application development can be served soundly. In this article; a new hybrid; real-time; memory-efficient; energy-efficient; user-friendly and fault-tolerant WSN OS MIROS is designed and implemented. MIROS implements the hybrid scheduler and the dynamic memory allocator. Real-time scheduling can thus be achieved with low memory consumption. In addition; it implements a mid-layer software EMIDE (Efficient Mid-layer Software for User-Friendly Application Development Environment) to decouple the WSN application from the low-level system. The application programming process can consequently be simplified and the application reprogramming performance improved. Moreover; it combines both the software and the multi-core hardware techniques to conserve the energy resources; improve the node reliability; as well as achieve a new debugging method. To evaluate the performance of MIROS; it is compared with the other WSN OSes (TinyOS; Contiki; SOS; openWSN and mantisOS) from different OS concerns. The final evaluation results prove that MIROS is suitable to be used even on the tight resource-constrained WSN nodes. It can support the real-time WSN applications. Furthermore; it is energy efficient; user friendly and fault tolerant.

Prospects of Wireless Energy-Aware Sensors for Smart Factories in the Industry 4.0 Era

“…With the introduction of multi-core architectures, many developers use modern microcontrollers to optimize code performance by implementing separate instructions in separate microcontrollers. This is known as parallelism [87], where various cores execute programs in parallel, realizing more efficiency. Multi-core sensor nodes provide energy efficiency compared to traditional single-core nodes for two reasons.…”

Novel Hybrid Scheduling Technique for Sensor Nodes with Mixed Criticality Tasks

“…While the hardware progress is rapidly accelerating, the development of new in-network information processing techniques adapted to such time-critical applications remains a significant challenge for both researchers and practitioners. Typical sensor networks are endowed by operating systems that provide no or limited support for real-time applications [ 4 , 5 ]: TinyOS employs a simple non-preemptive First-In-First-Out (FIFO) scheduling algorithm [ 6 ]; Contiki is an event-driven operating systems using priority based interrupts [ 7 ]; LiteOS uses a priority-based process scheduling algorithm [ 8 ]; and the MultimodAl system for NeTworks of In-situ wireless Sensors (MANTIS) provides very limited support for real-time applications using a preemptive priority-based scheduling with priority classes [ 9 ]. However, in the scientific literature, two notable exceptions have been reported: (a) Nano-RK [ 10 ], which is a real-time operating system that implements a priority driven fully preemptive scheduling algorithm; and (b) MIROS, which employs a multithreaded scheduling model based on the RMS (Rate Monotonic Scheduling) [ 5 ].…”

A Novel Event Detection Framework for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

“…At present, the event detection method for WSN can be classified into three types: detection methods based on threshold [17], methods based on spatial-temporal model [18] and methods based on pattern [19]. If sensor readings are more than default threshold, detection methods based on threshold will determine the occurrence of events.…”