an efficient operating system abstraction layer for portable applications in the domain of wireless sensor networks
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.
operating system abstraction embedded wsn api