WSNs Operating Systems

TinyOS

Contiki

MANTIS

Nano-RK

LiteOS

2/32
WSNs Operating Systems – TinyOS
TinyOS is result of a collaboration between the University of
California, Berkeley, Intel Research, and Crossbow Technology.
It was first released in 2000 as a free and open-source software under a
BSD (Berkeley Source Distribution) license (Latest release: 2.1.2 /
August 20, 20120)
TinyOS is an embedded, component-based operating system and
platform for low-power wireless devices, such as those used in wireless
sensor networks (WSNs), smartdust, ubiquitous/pervasive computing,
personal area networks, building automation, and smart devices (e.g.
smart meters).
It is written in the programming language nesC (i.e: a programming
language for WSNs).
3/32
WSNs Operating Systems - Contiki
Contiki is a light-weight open source operating system for
networked, memory-constrained systems with a focus on low-power
wireless devices (sensor nodes).
Contiki was created by Adam Dunkels in 2002 and has been
further developed by a worldwide team of developers from Texas
Instruments, Atmel, Cisco, ENEA, ETH Zurich, Redwire, RWTH
Aachen University, Oxford University, SAP, Sensinode, Swedish
Institute of Computer Science, ST Microelectronics, Zolertia, and
many others.
Contiki provides multitasking and a built-in Internet Protocol Suite
(TCP/IP stack), yet needs only about 10 kilobytes of random-access
memory (RAM) and 30 kilobytes of read-only memory (ROM).
 A full system, including a graphical user interface, needs about 30 kilobytes of
RAM.
4/32
WSNs Operating Systems - Contiki
 Screenshot showing Contiki 2.6
running on 41 nodes in the Cooja
Contiki network simulator.
 Initial release: 10 March 2003

 Latest release: 4.8 / 14 July 2022

 License: BSD
 Official website: www.contiki-os.org

5/32
WSNs Operating Systems - MANTIS
The MultimodAl system for NeTworks of In-situ wireless
Sensors (MANTIS) provides a new multithreaded
operating system for WSNs.
MANTIS is a very lightweight and energy efficient open
source operating system.
MANTIS OS was developed by a team of researchers at the
University of Colorado Boulder, USA, led by Professor
David Culler. The team began developing MANTIS OS in
the early 2000s, and the first version of the operating
system was released in 2005.

6/32
WSNs Operating Systems - MANTIS
MANTIS has size of 500 bytes, which includes kernel,
scheduler, and network stack.
The MANTIS Operating System (MOS) key feature is that
it is portable across multiple platforms, i.e., we can test
MOS applications on a PDA or a PC. Afterwards, the
application can be ported to the sensor node.
MOS is written in C and it supports application
development in C.

7/32
WSNs Operating Systems – Nano-RK
Nano-RK was developed by Anand Eswaran, Anthony Rowe, and Raj
Rajkumar at Carnegie Mellon University in 2005.
It was designed to be a lightweight and energy-efficient real-time
operating system (RTOS) for wireless sensor networks (WSNs).
Nano-RK is a fixed, preemptive multitasking operating system designed
to run on micro-controllers for use in sensor networks.
It is also open source operating system that is written in C and runs on the
Atmel-microcontroller-based sensor networking platform, the MicaZ
motes as well as the MSP430 processor.
Nano-RK provides networking support through socket-like abstraction.

8/32
WSNs Operating Systems – LiteOS
 LiteOS is also a real-time operating system (RTOS) from University of Illinois for
use in sensor networks.
 LiteOS is a Unix-like operating system that fits on memory-constrained sensor
nodes.
 This operating system allows users to operate wireless sensor networks like
operating Unix, which is easier for people with adequate Unix background.
 LiteOS provides a familiar programming environment based on Unix, threads, and
C.
 LiteOS is open source, written in C and runs on the Atmel based sensor nodes,
such as MicaZ.
 LiteOS is primarily composed of three components: LiteShell, LiteFS, and the
Kernel.
 The latest version of LiteOS is 2.0.1, which was released on September 12, 2011.
9/32
 From the above table it can be seen that few OSs provide support for real-time
application.
 Some OSs provide support for priority scheduling while many others do not even provide
support for this.
 Apart from Nano-RK, none of the aforementioned OSs provide support for real-time
applications at the communication protocol stack.
 It can also been seen that early OSs for WSNs emphasized on using an event driven
programming paradigm. However, as programmers are more familiar with threading based
programming paradigm, contemporary OSs for WSNs support the threading based
programming model.
Simulators for WSNs
The Wireless Sensor Network applications require an end-to-end data
transmission to achieve the required performance.
It requires much effort and is expensive to study and analyze the
behaviors of such WSNs by means of a test bed or deploying the WSN
nodes in real-world environments.
Therefore, various network simulators have been developed and they
mainly focus on protocols used in WSNs.
 Some of them are general simulators, while others are specific to a hardware
platform or operating system.

In next few slides, we’ll discuss some of the simulators used for
Wireless Sensor Network.

13
Simulators for WSNs – NS (Network Simulator) NS-2/3
 The NS (Network Simulator) simulator was originally developed by Steve
McCanne, Sally Floyd, Kevin Fall, and other contributors at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory in the mid-1990s. It was initially released as ns-1, and it
quickly became the most popular network simulator in the research community.
 NS-2/3 is a predominant discrete event, object-oriented, network simulator in
scientific environment written in C++.
 It is a widely used general purpose network simulator and has a rich library of
protocols but focuses mainly on IP networks.
 Though NS-2 is a popular and widely used simulator there are some drawbacks:

 NS-2 does not provide detailed support for measuring the energy utilization of
different hardware, software, and firmware components of a WSN node.
 The interdependence between modules due to object oriented design of Ns2 makes
addition of new protocol more difficult.

The latest version of ns-3 is 3.39, which was released in July 2023.
14
Simulators for WSNs – GloMoSim Simulator
GloMoSim stands for Global Mobile Information System
Simulator, which is a scalable simulation environment for large
scale wired and wireless communication networks.
The GLOMOSIM simulator was developed in the early 1990s by a
team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA), led by Professor Rajeev Jain.
The first version of GLOMOSIM was released in 1993, and it
quickly became a popular network simulator for research and
development on wireless networks.
GLOMOSIM is a parallel discrete-event simulator that supports a
wide range of network protocols and technologies, including TCP,
UDP, IP, IPv4, IPv6, IEEE 802.11, and CDMA2000.

15
Simulators for WSNs – GloMoSim Simulator
GLOMOSIM also includes a variety of tools for modeling and
analyzing network performance, such as packet traces, flow
analysis, and statistical analysis.
GLOMOSIM has been used to simulate a wide range of wireless
networks, including cellular networks, sensor networks, and ad
hoc networks.
It has also been used to study a variety of networking problems,
such as routing, congestion control, and security.
GLOMOSIM is a powerful and versatile network simulator that is
used by researchers and developers all over the world to design,
develop, and evaluate new wireless networks.

16
Simulators for WSNs – TOSSIM Simulator
TOSSIM (TinyOS Simulation Framework) is an open source discrete
event simulator for TinyOS based sensor networks.
It was developed by Philip Buonadonna and David Culler at the
University of California, Berkeley, in the early 2000s.
The first version of TOSSIM was released in 2003.
TOSSIM supports a wide range of sensor networking features, such as
multi-hop wireless communication, power management, and real-
time task scheduling.
TOSSIM is used by researchers and developers to design, develop,
and evaluate new wireless sensor networks and applications.
It is also used in teaching to help students learn about wireless sensor
network concepts and principles.
The latest version of TOSSIM is 3.2, which was released in 2021.
17
Simulators for WSNs
J-Sim:
J-Sim is an open source, general purpose,
component based network simulator developed in
Java.

J-Sim provides an object-oriented approach of:

(i) target, sensor and sink nodes,
(ii) sensor and wireless communication channels, and
(iii) physical media such as mobility model and power model (both
energy-producing and energy-consuming components)

18
Simulators for WSNs – Other Simulators
SENSE (SEnsor Network Simulator and Emulator)

SenSim (Sensor Network Simulator)

OPNet (Optimized Network Engineering Tools)

OMNeT++ (Objective Modular Network Testbed)

SENS (Sensor Environment and Network Simulator)

UWSim (UnderWater Simulator)

A Simulator for underwater Sensor Network

VisualSense, etc…

19
WSNs Testbeds
WiseBed

SensLAB

MoteLAB

CitySense

Sensei

Indriya

20/32
WSNs Testbeds - WiseBed
The WISEBED is a large-scale WSN testbed and it is a joint effort of nine
European Universities and Research Institutes (see next slide).
The operating systems supported by the testbed are Contiki and TinyOS.

WISEBED is an open testbed.

Usually, a user can access the testbed by creating an account at the

WISEBED’s site; afterwards the user can freely use the WSN testbed.
WISEBED meets usability criteria through supporting different
hardware/software platforms along with a range of methods to access the
testbed.

21/32
WSNs Testbeds - WiseBed

22/32
 WSNs Testbeds - SensLAB
 The SensLAB is a very large-scale WSN testbed with a total of 1000 nodes deployed at four
sites in France.
 The main goal of SensLAB is to offer an accurate and efficient scientific tool to help in the
design and development of large scale WSN.
INRIA stands for Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique
 SensLAB is currently deployed at: (French: National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control)
 (i) INRIA Grenoble, (ii) INRIA Lille, (iii) INRIA Rennes, and (iv) University of Strasbourg.
 The hardware used in the SensLAB testbed includes different versions of WSN430 nodes. It
includes:
 WSN430 heart rate daughter board, WSN430 GPS-Accelerometer daughter board, WSN430 testbed
daughter board, Bluetooth daughter board, and WSN430 motion capture daughter board.
 From the software perspective SensLAB provides support for three operating systems:
Contiki, FreeRTOS, and TinyOS.
 SensLAB is open to researchers of the host institutes and outside users need to request
permission in order to use the testbed.
 SensLAB provides a web-based system to access the testbed.

23/32
 WSNs Testbeds - MoteLab
The MoteLab is a WSN testbed developed at the Electrical and Computer
Engineering department of Harvard University.
It is a public testbed - users can run their WSN applications using a web-
based interface.
Registered users can schedule their applications on wireless sensor nodes,
upload binary images, and visualize wireless sensor nodes output through
the web-based interface.
The testbed stores the output of wireless sensor nodes in a database and
the detailed output is presented to the user once the job is completed.
The design of the MoteLab testbed revolves around the server, a MySQL
database backend, a web interface, a DBLogger, and a Job Daemon,
which is responsible for reprogramming the nodes, killing processes
pertaining to finished jobs, and allocating and de-allocating other system
components.
24/32
WSNs Testbeds - MoteLab
Moreover, the MoteLab testbed imposes a quota on each registered
user in terms of total duration of pending jobs i.e., if the user quota
allows 40 minutes of testbed usage then the user cannot run jobs
that exceed the 40 minutes duration.
MoteLab only supports the TinyOS operating system, therefore
users need to know the NesC programming language.
The MoteLab testbed consists of 190 Tmote Sky wireless sensor
nodes.

25/32
WSNs Testbeds - CitySense
CitySense is an open wireless mesh and sensor networking testbed
that spans the entire city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
The goals of CitySense include: an evaluation platform for WSN
applications, support for new mesh routing algorithms, new
distributed algorithms for in-network data processing and
aggregation, novel programming abstractions/models, and to enable
users to reprogram the nodes using the Internet.
The key features of CitySense are: city-wide deployment and
monitoring of the physical world through sensors.
The CitySense aim was to deploy a city-wide wireless mesh and
sensor network testbed. Therefore, it was not feasible to use sensor
nodes that communicate at a range of less than 100 meters.

26/32
WSNs Testbeds - CitySense
The CitySense team envisions that future WSN applications will
demand high data rate and complex processing at the nodes.
Therefore, they decided to develop sensor nodes that can
communicate using the IEEE 802.11 standard.
Furthermore, the web interface is hosted on the server that enables
users interaction with the testbed.

27/32
WSNs Testbeds - Sensei
Sensei is a WSN testbed developed at Uppsala University, Sweden.
 The distinguishing feature of Sensei is that it provides support for mobile nodes and its
dynamic nature makes it possible to evaluate WSN application performance in a range of
environments.
 Wireless sensor nodes, sensor hosts, site manager, and monitors constitute the design of
the Sensei testbed.
 A group of sensor nodes is connected to a sensor host and there are a number of sensor
hosts present in the testbed.
 Since the testbed supports mobile nodes, sensor hosts keep track of mobile nodes and
inform the site manager about the location of these nodes periodically.
 Communication among sensor hosts takes place using the IEEE802.11 standard.
 The testbed provides support for both TinyOS and Contiki operating systems.

28/32
WSNs Testbeds - Summary

Indriya is a large-scale, low-cost wireless sensor network testbed

deployed at the National University of Singapore.
29/32
Any Questions?

30/32