Thesis: Operating Systems dynamic optimization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Author: Roberto Rodriguez-Zurrunero

Advisor: Alvaro Araujo Pinto

Synopsis:  Wireless Sensor Networks are composed by multiple tiny nodes with limited resources. It is very important to manage the nodes operation as best as possible. This way it could be possible to improve the global performance with these limited resources. Therefore, an Operating System (OS) may be used to control the hardware and provide hardware abstraction to applications. The basic functionalities of an OS include resource abstractions for various hardware devices, interrupt management, task scheduling, concurrency control, and networking support. With these OS services the developers may program high-level applications independent of the underlying hardware and improving the nodes management. A traditional OS could not be embedded on WSN because they are used on systems with plenty of resources and different requirements. In WSN the resources are limited so an OS should manage them the best possible and it should involve the less overload possible in memory and CPU usage.

This thesis deals with the OS for WSN field. The goal is to take advantage of dynamic optimization of OS to improve some specific WSN parameter such as energy efficiency, processing capacity, flexibility, reliability, security and networking.