Research of a resource-efficient, real-time and fault-tolerant wireless sensor network system

Abstract

Memory optimization, energy conservation, real-time scheduling and fault tolerance are the essential research topics in the wireless sensor network (WSN). In this paper, a memory-efficient, energy-efficient, real-time and fault-tolerant WSN system LiveOS is designed and implemented. Compared to the other systems, LiveOS has several typical features. Firstly, the optimized Rate-Monotonic Scheduling (RMS) scheduling algorithm is implemented. By doing this, the memory cost of the multithreaded real-time operating system (RTOS) can be 47.3% optimized if compared to the traditional single-core node. Consequently, the RTOS becomes appropriate to run even on the memory-constrained WSN nodes. Secondly, the new research approach that addresses the WSN challenges by combining both the multi-core hardware technique and the software technique is applied in LiveOS. By means of the multi-core hardware support, the energy cost of LiveOS can be 35% optimized compared to the traditional single-core platform. Moreover, the real-time scheduling performance and the fault-tolerant ability of the WSN nodes can be optimized significantly. Due to the above features, LiveOS becomes the WSN system which has small memory footprint, long lifetime, high real-time scheduling performance and upstanding fault-tolerant ability. The evaluation on the different prototype nodes proves that LiveOS is appropriate to run on the resource-constrained WSN platforms and is competent to execute the outdoor real-time WSN applications.