Analysis of Sensor Network Operating System Performance Throughout the Software Life Cycle

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are evolving beyond research prototypes towards real world deployments in various application domains. While prior research has resulted in a range of operating systems and associated programming languages, a comprehensive empirical analysis of WSN operating systems is missing from the literature. We address this problem through an empirical study of all actively maintained WSN operating systems for the popular Tmote Sky / TelosB platform: TinyOS, Contiki and Lorien. Our analysis considers overhead at each stage of the software life cycle. During the development phase, we measure developer effort in terms of lines of application code. During the execution phase we measure energy consumption, flash footprint and RAM usage. During the reconfiguration phase we measure artefact size and developer effort in terms of number of configuration commands. Our results indicate distinct trade-offs in terms of development effort, application performance and reconfiguration performance. We find that TinyOS performs best for static applications with tight RAM constraints, while Contiki offers the lowest development effort and Lorien performs best in dynamic applications which require reconfiguration.