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A comparison of software platforms for wireless sensor networks: MANTIS, TinyOS, and ZigBee

Published: 09 February 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by very tight code size and power constraints and by a lack of well-established standard software development platforms such as Posix. In this article, we present a comparative study between a few fairly different such platforms, namely MANTIS, TinyOS, and ZigBee, when considering them from the application developer's perspective, that is, by focusing mostly on functional aspects, rather than on performance or code size. In other words, we compare both the tasking model used by these platforms and the API libraries they offer. Sensor network applications are basically event based, so most of the software platforms are also built on considering event handling mechanism, however some use a more traditional thread based model. In this article, we consider implementations of a simple generic application in MANTIS, TinyOS, and the Ember ZigBee development framework, with the goal of depicting major differences between these platforms, and suggesting a programming style aimed at maximizing portability between them.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems  Volume 8, Issue 2
January 2009
243 pages
ISSN:1539-9087
EISSN:1558-3465
DOI:10.1145/1457255
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 09 February 2009
Accepted: 01 July 2008
Received: 01 June 2008
Published in TECS Volume 8, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Wireless sensor networks
  2. application porting
  3. software platform

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  • (2014)A Comprehensive WSN-Based Approach to Efficiently Manage a Smart GridSensors10.3390/s14101874814:10(18748-18783)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2014
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