Technological progress in integrated, low-power, CMOS communication devices and sensors makes a rich design space of networked sensors viable. They can be deeply embedded in the physical world or spread throughout our environment. The missing elements are an overall system architecture and a methodology for systematic advance. To this end, we identify key requirements, develop a small device that is representative of the class, design a tiny event-driven operating system, and show that it provides support for efficient modularity and concurrency-intensive operation. Our operating system fits in 178 bytes of memory, propagates events in the time it takes to copy 1.25 bytes of memory, context switches in the time it takes to copy 6 bytes of memory and supports two level scheduling. The analysis lays a groundwork for future architectural advances.

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Abstract. We present TinyOS, a flexible, application-specific operating system for sensor networks, which form a core component of ambient intelligence systems. Sensor networks consist of (potentially) thousands of tiny, low-power nodes, each of which execute concurrent, reactive programs that must operate with severe memory and power constraints. The sensor network challenges of limited resources, event-centric concurrent applications, and low-power operation drive the design of TinyOS. Our solution combines flexible, fine-grain components with an execution model that supports complex yet safe concurrent operations. TinyOS meets these challenges well and has become the platform of choice for sensor network research; it is in use by over a hundred groups worldwide, and supports a broad range of applications and research topics. We provide a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the system, showing that it supports complex, concurrent programs with very low memory requirements (many applications fit within 16KB of memory, and the core OS is 400 bytes) and efficient, low-power operation. We present our experiences with TinyOS as a platform for sensor network innovation and applications. 1

We present an implementation and evaluation of an Active Messages based communication system for tiny, wireless, networked sensors. The implementation includes two major software components. The first is the device based operating program which includes the communication subsystem, dispatch loop and AM handlers. The second is a communication library for general purpose host computers. Using an Atmel 8535 based device and an Intel Pentium II PC, we demonstrate an ad hoc networking application that uses Active Message primitives for multi-hop route discovery and packet delivery on silver dollar sized devices. We also make observations about the applicability of TCP/IP to the Tiny Networked Sensor regime.

this paper we focus on Windows NT, which was the dominant version at the time the work was done, and was also available to us for measurements. However, we also mention new features introduced in Windows 2000 where relevant