Evaluation of Operating System Requirements for Safe Wireless Sensor Networks

In the context of high-performance Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the safety requirements can be very challenging. Currently available operating systems for applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain have different requirements from traditional safety-related applications. With the increasing trend to develop WSN-enabled applications also in the industrial domain and, in general, in human-safety related applications, it is mandatory to assess whether existing systems can be adapted to different application domains, and to estimate the degree of this effort. This paper compares two commonly used operating systems for IoT applications, Contiki-OS and TinyOS, with ChibiOS, a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) used to develop an experimental real-time WSN stack. Its characteristic are evaluated with respect to common requirements of safety-related applications.