Contiki
From Capsil Wiki
Different to TinyOS, Contiki [1] is an IP based operating system developed by a consortium of industry and academia led by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. Industry players include SAP, Cisco and Atmel. Contiki is fully certified for IPV6 and has found applications where this large address range is required. It was originally designed for microcontrollers and applications where large scale was involved, however as modern wireless sensors are not much different to microcontrollers (differences in memory, power and mobility), Contiki has been adapted to large scale wireless sensor applications including road tunnel fire monitoring, intrusion detection, water monitoring in the Baltic Sea, and in surveillance networks.
Some of the unique features of the Contiki OS include;
- Contiki provides both full IP networking and low-power radio communication mechanisms. For communication within wireless sensor network, Contiki uses the “Rime low-power radio networking stack”. The “Rime” stack implements sensor network protocols ranging from reliable data collection and best-effort network flooding to multi-hop bulk data transfer and data dissemination. IP packets are tunneled over multi-hop routing via the Rime stack. Interaction with a network of Contiki sensors can be achieved with a Web browser, a text-based shell interface, or dedicated software that stores and displays collected sensor data.
- Contiki provides a software-based power profiling mechanism that keeps track of the energy expenditure of each sensor node. Being software-based, the mechanism allows power profiling at the network scale without any additional hardware.
- Contiki provides a flash-based file system called “Coffee”, for storing data inside the sensor network. The file system allows multiple files to coexist on the same physical on-board flash memory and has a performance that is close to the raw data throughput of the flash chip.
- A powerful feature of Contiki is its development and simulation environments. To ease software development and debugging, Contiki provides three simulation environments. Contiki typically goes through all three simulation stages before the software runs on the target hardware.
References
- Back to BSN Operating Systems and Development Page
- Back to main Body Sensor Networks Page
- Back to Main Page
