SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

System and three generations of a hardware platform designed to address the needs of wireless sensor networks. Our operating system, called TinyOS uses an event based execution model to provide support for finegrained concurrency and incorporates a highly efficient component model. TinyOS enables us to use a hardware architecture that has a single processor time shared between both application and protocol processing. We show how a virtual partitioning of computational resources not only leads to efficient resource utilization but allows for a rich interface between application and protocol processing. This rich interface, in turn, allows developers to exploit application specific communication protocols that significantly improve system performance. The hardware platforms we develop are used to validate a generalized architecture that is technology independent. Our general architecture contains a single central controller that performs both application and protocol-level processing. For flexibility, this controller is directly connected to the RF transceiver.