Title :
A low overhead dynamic memory management system for constrained memory embedded systems
Author :
Das, Supratim ; Singh, Amarjeet ; Singh, Surinder Pal ; Kumar, Amit
Author_Institution :
IIIT-Delhi, New Delhi, India
Abstract :
Embedded systems programming often involve choosing the worst case static memory allocation for most applications over a dynamic allocation approach. Such a design decision is rightly justified in terms of reliability, security and real time performance requirements from such low end systems. However with the introduction of public key cryptography and dynamic reconfiguration in IP enabled sensing devices for use in several “Internet of Things” applications, dynamic memory allocation in embedded devices, is becoming more important than ever before. While several embedded operating systems like MantisOS, SOS and Contiki provide dynamic memory allocation support, they usually lack flexibility or have relatively large memory overhead. In this paper we introduce two novel dynamic memory allocation schemes, ST_MEMMGR (without memory compaction) and ST_COMPACT_MEMMGR (with memory compaction), with a close compliance with the libc memory allocation API. Both designs take into account the very limited RAM (1KB - 64KB) in most microcontrollers. Experimental results show that ST_MEMMGR has a 256 - 5376 bytes lesser memory overhead than similar non-compaction based open source allocators like heapLib and memmgr. Similarly, ST_COMPACT_MEMMGR is observed to have 33% smaller memory descriptor as compared to Contiki´s managed memory allocator with similar performance in terms of execution speed.
Keywords :
application program interfaces; embedded systems; operating systems (computers); storage management; Internet of Things; ST_COMPACT_MEMMGR; ST_MEMMGR; constrained memory embedded systems; dynamic memory allocation support; dynamic reconfiguration; embedded operating systems; libc memory allocation API; low overhead dynamic memory management system; public key cryptography; worst case static memory allocation; Compaction; Dynamic scheduling; Embedded systems; Memory management; Protocols; Random access memory; Resource management; Dynamic Memory Management; Embedded Systems; Memory Compaction; Memory Fragmentation; Microcontrollers; WSN;
Conference_Titel :
Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom), 2015 2nd International Conference on
Conference_Location :
New Delhi
Print_ISBN :
978-9-3805-4415-1