A Survey on Resource Management in IoT Operating Systems

Abstract

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention due to its capability to translate our physical world into a digital cyber world with meaningful information. The IoT devices are smaller in size, sheer in number, contain less memory, use less energy, and have more computational capabilities. These scarce resources for IoT devices are powered by small operating systems (OSs) that are specially designed to support the IoT devices' diverse applications and operational requirements. These IoT OSs are responsible for managing the constrained resources of IoT devices efficiently and in a timely manner. In this paper, discussions on IoT devices and OS resource management are provided. In detail, the resource management mechanisms of the state-of-the-art IoT OSs, such as Contiki, TinyOS, and FreeRTOS, are investigated. The different dimensions of their resource management approaches (including process management, memory management, energy management, communication management, and file management) are studied, and their advantages and limitations are highlighted.

Keywords

• Internet of Things
• operating systems
• resource management
• Contiki
• TinyOS
• FreeRTOS