A Survey Report on Operating Systems for Tiny Networked Sensors

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has attracted researchers worldwide to explore the research opportunities, with application mainly in health monitoring, industry automation, battlefields, home automation and environmental monitoring. A WSN is highly resource constrained in terms of energy, computation and memory. WSNs deployment ranges from the normal working environment up to hostile and hazardous environment such as in volcano monitoring and underground mines. These characteristics of WSNs hold additional set of challenges in front of the operating system designer. The objective of this survey is to highlight the features and weakness of the opearting system available for WSNs, with the focus on the current application demands. The paper also discusses the operating system design issues in terms of architecture, programming model, scheduling and memory management and support for real time applications.