Research on the Priority-Based Soft Real-Time Task Scheduling in TinyOS

TinyOS [1] is an open-source operating system, using Component Description Language NesC[2] for development. TinyOS is designed mostly for wireless sensor network, in which nodes have very limited resources. A representative scheduling mechanism in TinyOS is analyzed and its shortcomings are listed in this paper. An improved design of the priority-based soft real-time task scheduling strategy is proposed after the analysis. After two experiments are carried out on the GAINS nodes, it shows that the new method can effectively improve the communication performance on wireless sensor networks.