Article

t-kernel: providing reliable OS support to wireless sensor networks

Authors:

John A. StankovicAuthors Info & Claims

SenSys '06: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems

Pages 1 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/1182807.1182809

Published: 31 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The development of a reliable large-scale wireless sensor network (WSN) is very difficult because of resource constraints, energy budget, and demanding application requirements. Three OS features-OS protection, virtual memory, and preemptive scheduling-can significantly improve the reliability of WSN systems and facilitate developing complex WSN software. However, due to the lack of hardware support for privileged execution and address translation, it is impossible to implement these features with traditional OS design techniques. To solve this problem, we design a new OS kernel, the t-kernel, to perform extensive code modification at load time. The modified code and the OS work in a collaborative way supporting the aforementioned features. Having implemented the t-kernel on MICA2 motes, we evaluate its performance by measuring the overhead and execution speed. We analyze the CPU utilization of sensor network applications, and verify that, though CPU-bound tasks execute 1.5-3 times as long as in native mode, application performance under typical workloads does not noticeably degrade. The t-kernel significantly enhances developers' ability to design reliable and sophisticated sensor networks, and includes several new design techniques, such as efficient binary translation on highly constrained sensor nodes, differentiated virtual memory without repeatedly writable swapping devices, and the protection of the OS from application errors without privileged execution hardware.

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cover image ACM Conferences

SenSys '06: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems

October 2006

444 pages

ISBN:1595933433

DOI:10.1145/1182807

General Chair:
Andrew Campbell
Dartmouth University
,
Program Chairs:
Philippe Bonnet
University of Copenhagen (DIKU), Denmark
,
John Heidemann
University of Southern California/ISI, USA

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 31 October 2006

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https://doi.org/10.1109/CSR57506.2023.10225007
Li BFan HGao YDong WBulusu NAryafar EBalasubramanian ASong J(2022)Bringing webassembly to resource-constrained iot devices for seamless device-cloud integrationProceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3498361.3538922(261-272)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
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https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2021.3066637
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