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An efficient operating system abstraction layer for portable applications in the domain of wireless sensor networks

Published: 04 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Portability is a major concern in developing applications for embedded devices such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Abstractions of the hardware platform which are introduced by the operating system (OS) make possible to develop code independent of the hardware, which can be reused in later deployments. However, the lack of standard APIs for the variety of OS in the domain of WSN restricts portability to those systems running the same OS.
We present on-going work on the design and development of a portable operating system abstraction layer (OSAL), which achieves a complete abstraction of the OS architecture as well as a common API across multiple OS. Portability at the application level is effectively achieved thanks to a common set of primitives which abstract the underlaying OS and its particular architecture.
We provide argumentation to highlight the efficiency of the OSAL and a general introduction to its features and design considerations. Moreover, we present a preliminary evaluation of the current implementation, which has proven to introduce minimal run-time overhead as well as negligible increase on the software footprint.

References

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A. Schoofs, M. Aoun, P. van der Stok, J. Catalano, R. Serna Oliver, and G. Fohler, "On enabling portable and time-controlled wireless sensor network applications," in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Sensor Networks Applications, Experimentation and Logistics (SENSAPEAL09), Athens, Greece, September 2009.
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  1. An efficient operating system abstraction layer for portable applications in the domain of wireless sensor networks

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SenSys '09: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
    November 2009
    438 pages
    ISBN:9781605585192
    DOI:10.1145/1644038

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 04 November 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. API
    2. WSN
    3. abstraction
    4. embedded
    5. operating system

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