Design and evaluation of multitasking-based software communications architecture for real-time sensor networking platforms

Abstract

Real-time wireless sensor networking platform should satisfy requirements of sensor networking features - efficient exploitation of limited resources and energy efficiency, real-time characteristics and scalability. Existing studies on sensor networking platforms, such as TinyOS and DCOS, have been focused on solving the maximization problem of exploitation of limited resources and the energy efficiency. Envisioned application scenarios applied in sensor networking platforms need to perform real-time sensing activity as well as provide good response time with task communication, and support the scalability to improve productivity. The proposed method is able to support task scheduling which meets deadlines of all the periodic tasks and provides aperiodic tasks with good average response time. It also supports the scalability by dividing the functionalities in sensor node into periodic and aperiodic tasks. Experimental results show that our method improves real-time characteristics of sensor networking platforms by means of guaranteeing to complete the execution of all the periodic tasks within their deadlines and having a good response time for aperiodic tasks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.