Development of a Resource-Efficient and Fault-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Network System

Memory optimization, energy conservation and fault tolerance are the essential research topics in the wireless sensor network (WSN). In this paper, a real-time, memory-efficient, energy-efficient and fault-tolerant WSN system LiveOS is designed and implemented. Compared to the other systems, LiveOS has several typical features. On the one hand, the optimized Rate-Monotonic Scheduling (RMS) mechanism is applied in LiveOS. With this mechanism, the memory cost of the multithreaded real-time operating system (RTOS) can be decreased significantly. As a result, the RTOS becomes suitable to run even on the memory-constrained WSN nodes. On the other hand, the new research approach, which addresses the WSN challenges by combining the software technique with the multi-core hardware technique, is used in LiveOS. By means of the multi-core hardware platform, the energy cost and the fault-tolerant ability of the WSN nodes can be optimized greatly. Due to the above features, LiveOS becomes the WSN OS which has small memory footprint, low energy cost and high fault-tolerant ability. The evaluations on the different WSN nodes prove that LiveOS is appropriate to run on the resource-constrained WSN nodes to execute the real-time WSN applications.