A SoC-based sensor node: Evaluation of RETOS-enabled CC2430

Recent progress in Wireless Sensor Networks technology has enabled many complicated real-world applications. Some of the applications demand a non-trivial amount of computation; some run multiple tasks concurrently on a sensor node. Supporting highly concurrent, heterogeneous, and computation-oriented sensor applications may require adequate functionality of the operating system. Multi-threaded operating systems for sensor networks have recently been developed to offer an alternative programming environment to the conventional event-driven system, and the operating principle of the multi-threaded system is considered suitable for this category of applications. Although a multi-threaded operating system provides many advantages, its efficient implementation, especially on a resource-limited sensor node, is a big challenge; hence, powerful hardware with low energy consumption is always sought. The latest development of SoC (System-on-Chip) technology has enabled some of the interesting processor s that are suitable for the sensor node platform. The Chipcon's CC2430 processor, for instance, is equipped with a high-performance processor core and IEEE802.15.4-compliant radio in a single chip. In this paper, we describe the development of a CC2430-based sensor node, especially from the viewpoint of system software and its performance. We have successfully ported the multi-threaded RETOS operating system on the hardware, and the implementation details are discussed in the paper. As the primary objective of our work is to understand the performance of the developed hardware, we have evaluated the system with extensive experiments. Our experiences show that the CC2430-based sensor node is powerful and energy-efficient, and a suitable platform, especially for multi-threaded sensor operating systems.