Low-end Internet Of Things Research Articles

A processor for IoT applications: An assessment of design space and trade-offs

Contemporary embedded systems require low-power solutions while still keeping a minimum performance level, and this is even more acute in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, with its vast design space. This work proposes a configurable RISC processor associated to a design flow that includes a hardware synthesis flow and a software toolchain. This design flow is useful to explore design space and trade-offs of processor cores for IoT applications, by enabling multiple hardware configurations with variable degrees of complexity, while maintaining compatibility with the chosen instruction set architecture, which is itself configurable. Results rely on example designs targeting a 65 nm technology and post-mapped hardware simulations of two benchmarks sets, the CoreMark and Mälardalen suites. These results indicate that substantial power savings can be obtained by tailoring the architecture to a given application class, while reducing hardware complexity and maintaining performance figures. Findings show that the proposed processor provides an interesting resource to target low-end and middle-sized IoT applications, while demonstrating that reducing hardware complexity usually leads to the best trade-off between performance and power.

Operating Systems for Low-End Devices in the Internet of Things: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to soon interconnect tens of billions of new devices, in large part also connected to the Internet. IoT devices include both high-end devices which can use traditional go-to operating systems (OSs) such as Linux, and low-end devices which cannot, due to stringent resource constraints, e.g., very limited memory, computational power, and power supply. However, large-scale IoT software development, deployment, and maintenance requires an appropriate OS to build upon. In this paper, we thus analyze in detail the specific requirements that an OS should satisfy to run on low-end IoT devices, and we survey applicable OSs, focusing on candidates that could become an equivalent of Linux for such devices, i.e., a one-size-fits-most, open source OS for low-end IoT devices.