A benchmarking tool for Wireless Sensor Network embedded operating systems

The emergence of the technology of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has lead to many changes in current and traditional computational techniques in order to adapt to their harsh and scarce requirements. A WSN consists of sensor nodes with wireless communication abilities that allow them to form a network. New system architectures have emerged to overcome sensor network limitations. Each architecture follows one of the two traditional design concepts, event-driven or thread-driven design. Although event-driven systems were assumed to generally perform better for embedded systems, tests have shown that event-driven systems tend to save more energy and space, while the thread-driven systems provide more concurrency and predictability, hence creating a tradeoff depending on the requirements of the application at hand. Performance analyzers are often used to accurately measure the performance of a certain system when such a tradeoff is evident. Performance analyzers can also locate deficiencies in a certain system for future improvements. The ever increasing complexity of applications executed by WSNs and the evolving nature of the underlying Embedded Operating Systems (EOSs) has led to the need for an accurate evaluation technique to guide practitioners in the field. This paper presents a novel approach towards providing a benchmarking and performance evaluation tool for comparing and analyzing the performance of WSN EOSs.