The crucial importance of software platforms was highlighted by recent events
both at the political level (e.g. renewed calls for digital data and operating
system "sovereignty", following E. Snowden's revelations) and at the business
level (e.g. Android generated a new industry worth tens of billions of euros
yearly). In the Internet of Things, which is expected to generate business at
very large scale, but also to threaten even more individual privacy, such
aspects will be exacerbated. The need for an operating system like RIOT stems
from this context, and this short article outlines RIOT's main non-technical
aspects, as well as its key technical characteristics.Comment: 4 page

Baccelli, Emmanuel

Schleiser, Kaspar

English

arXiv

The crucial importance of software platforms was highlighted by recent events both at the political level (e.g. renewed calls for digital data and operating system ”sovereignty”, following E. Snowden’s revelations) and at the business level (e.g. Android generated a new industry worth tens of billions of euros yearly). In the IoT, which is expected to generate business at very large scale, while threatening even more individual privacy, such aspects will be exacerbated. The need for an operating system like RIOT stems from this context, as outlined in this report

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HAL Id: hal-01369669https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01369669Submitted on 28 Nov 2016HAL is a multi-disciplinary open accessarchive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come fromteaching and research institutions in France orabroad, or from public or private research centers.L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, estdestinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documentsscientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,émanant des établissements d’enseignement et derecherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoirespublics ou privés.Powering the Internet of Things with RIOT: Why?How? What is RIOT?Emmanuel Baccelli, Kaspar SchleiserTo cite this version:Emmanuel Baccelli, Kaspar Schleiser. Powering the Internet of Things with RIOT: Why? How?What is RIOT?. [Research Report] ArXiv. 2016. ￿hal-01369669￿Powering the Internet of Things with RIOT:Why? How? What is RIOT?E. Baccelli∗ and K. SchleiserThe crucial importance of software platforms was highlighted by recentevents both at the political level (e.g. renewed calls for digital data and op-erating system ”sovereignty”, following E. Snowden’s revelations) and at thebusiness level (e.g. Android generated a new industry worth tens of billions ofeuros yearly). In the IoT, which is expected to generate business at very largescale, while threatening even more individual privacy, such aspects will be ex-acerbated. The need for an operating system like RIOT [1] [2] stems from thiscontext, as outlined in the following.1 RIOT: Why?Despite enormous expectations for the Internet of Things [3], there is so far node facto standard software platform to program most IoT devices, which areconstrained in resources such as CPU, memory, energy. IoT software platformsthus face conflicting requirements : interoperability with the Internet, memory-constrained embedded programming, and portable, open-source code. Suchlimitations and requirements are expected to last [4], and make impossible theuse of traditional platforms such as Linux or derivatives, e.g. Android. In effect,the anticipated IoT industry depends on the emergence of standard softwareplatforms for IoT devices. In this context, it is vital that a strong alternativeemerges which can achieve the following goals:• allow long-term IoT software security and robustness,• enable trust, transparency and the protection of IoT users’ privacy,• accelerate innovation by spreading IoT software development costs,• reduce environmental impact by preventing IoT device lock-down.∗Emmanuel Baccelli works for INRIA. He is hosted at FU Berlin for joint work on RIOT.1Experience over the last decades (for instance, with Linux) shows that suchgoals are most likely achieved with a software platform that is:• open source,• free,• driven by a grassroots community.2 RIOT: How?In order to achieve the goals listed above in Section 1, the RIOT communitygathers a large number of contributors [5] from around the world (with variousbackgrounds including industry, academia, and hobbyists) and uses an approachbased on the following building blocks and principles.The RIOT community self-organizes in oder to follow clearly defined openprocesses [6], which favor transparency, and code quality. Technically, theRIOT community uses an open, online tool (GitHub [7]) allowing large-scaledistributed revision control and source code management. Furthermore, RIOTcode contribution processes mandate that the core of the software platform codeis free and licensed with a non-viral copyleft license (LGPLv2.1), which is ex-pected to avoid as much as possible death-by-forking while allowing indirectbusiness models around RIOT (similar to business around Linux).3 What is RIOT?RIOT is an open source operating system which achieves the combination of (i)the necessary memory and energy efficiency to fit on the widest range of relevantlow-end IoT devices [8], while (ii) offering the functionalities of a full-fledgedoperating system, i.e. full-featured, extensible network stacks providing sponta-neous wireless networking and end-to-end Internet connectivity (e.g. from IoTdevice to the cloud), as well a powerful API providing state-of-the-art develop-ment and debugging tools, uniform and consistent across all supported hardwarespanning across 32-bit, 16-bit, and 8-bit architectures. For an technical overviewof competing IoT software platforms, one can refer to this survey [8].From a technical perspective, in a nutshell, RIOT is an operating system basedon a micro-kernel architecture [9], with built-in energy efficiency and real-timecapabilities. RIOT enables full multi-threading as usually experienced on tra-ditional operating systems (e.g. Linux) and offers the capability to developefficient IoT applications in standard programming languages (C and C++ ),with tools that are well-known such as gcc, gdb, valgrind, wireshark etc. In-stance(s) of RIOT can actually run as process(es) on Linux and Mac OS, andthis feature is heavily used for debugging and testing purposes. Such character-istics eliminate most learning curves for embedded software design and shorten2development life-cycles for IoT products. For a third-party code analysis of theRIOT code base, one can refer to [13].On top of the aforementioned features, RIOT supports connectivity via sev-eral network stacks. One stack (GNRC) offers low-power IPv6 and 6LoWPANstandard-compliant connectivity, with an extendable software architecture. Inparticular, the modularity of GNRC enables efficient plug-in of newer and up-coming IoT protocols which go beyond the minimal compliant standard (e.g.RPL extensions [10] [11]). Other stacks are available, including for instance anexperimental stack based on novel network paradigms currently studied by theresearch community, such as content-centric networking [12].Due to the characteristics described in this document, RIOT offers an attractivebase for embedded IoT software development, may it be for industrial purposes,for prototyping, for experimental research purposes, or for teaching in this do-main – similarly to Linux in another domain.References[1] RIOT Website. Available online: http://www.riot-os.org[2] E. Baccelli, O. Hahm, H. Petersen, and K. Schleiser. ”RIOT and the Evolu-tion of IoT Operating Systems and Applications.” ERCIM News 2015, no.101, April 2015.[3] D. Evans, ”The Internet of Things : How the Next Evolution of the InternetIs Changing Everything,” Cisco White Paper, 2011.[4] L. Mirani, ”Chip-makers are Betting that Moore’s Law Won’t Matter in theInternet of Things,” 2014. Available online: http://qz.com/218514[5] List of RIOT contributors. Available online: https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/graphs/contributors[6] RIOT Community Processes. Available online: https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/wiki/RIOT-Community-Processes[7] RIOT on GitHub. Available online: https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT[8] O. Hahm, E. Baccelli, H. Petersen, N. Tsiftes, ”Operating Systems for Low-End Devices in the Internet of Things : a Survey,” in IEEE Internet ofThings Journal, Dec. 2015.[9] E. Baccelli, O. Hahm, M. Wählisch, M. Günes, T. Schmidt, ”RIOT OS:Towards an OS for the Internet of Things,” in Proceedings of IEEE INFO-COM, Demo/Poster for the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Com-puter Communications, Turin, Italy, April 2013.3[10] RFC 6997 : M. Goyal, E. Baccelli, M. Philipp, J. Martocci, A. Brandt,”Reactive Discovery of Point-to-Point Routes in Low Power and Lossy Net-works,” IETF Internet Draft, August 2013.[11] E. Baccelli, M. Philipp, M. Goyal, ”The P2P-RPL Routing Protocol forIPv6 Sensor Networks : Testbed Experiments,” Proceedings of the IEEEInternational Conference on Software Telecommunications and ComputerNetworks (SOFTCOM), Split, Croatia, September 2011.[12] E. Baccelli, C. Mehlis, O. Hahm, T. C. Schmidt, and M. Wählisch ”Infor-mation Centric Networking in the IoT: Experiments with NDN in the Wild,”in Proceeding. of ACM SIGCOMM ICN, the first ACM international Con-ference on Information-Centric Networking, Paris, Sept. 2014.[13] BlackDuck Open Hub code analysis of RIOT. Available online: https://www.openhub.net/p/RIOT-OS4

Powering the Internet of Things with RIOT: Why? How? What is RIOT?

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