Implementing new, high-performance MAC protocols requires real-time features,
to be able to synchronize correctly between different unrelated devices. Such
features are highly desirable for operating wireless sensor networks (WSN) that
are designed to be part of the Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, the
operating systems commonly used in this domain cannot provide such features. On
the other hand, "bare-metal" development sacrifices portability, as well as the
mul-titasking abilities needed to develop the rich applications that are useful
in the domain of the Internet of Things. We describe in this paper how we
helped solving these issues by contributing to the development of a port of
RIOT OS on the MSP430 microcontroller, an architecture widely used in
IoT-enabled motes. RIOT OS offers rich and advanced real-time features,
especially the simultaneous use of as many hardware timers as the underlying
platform (microcontroller) can offer. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of
these features by presenting a new implementation, on RIOT OS, of S-CoSenS, an
efficient MAC protocol that uses very low processing power and energy.Comment: SCITEPRESS. SENSORNETS 2015, Feb 2015, Angers, France.
http://www.scitepress.or
