Designing a State-driven Operating System for Dynamically Reconfigurable Sensor Networks

Abstract

Abstract — The operating environment and architecture of wireless sensor networks pose very unique design challenges and constraints to developers. Each node in a wireless sensor network must operate with extremely limited hardware resources yet possess wireless communication capability and support concurrency and reactive event processing. Also, it should be dynamically reconfigured at runtime to react to changes in environment and applications. In designing a runtime environment for wireless sensor nodes, it is thus essential to provide an operating system architecture that can meet these seemingly contradictory design requirements and constraints. In this paper, we present SenOS, an efficient and effective finite state machine-based operating system for wireless sensor nodes. We show that SenOS can operate in an extremely resource constrained sensor node while providing the desired concurrency, reactivity, and reconfigurability.