Cooperative Virtual Memory for Sensor Nodes
Hellbrück, Horst and Pinkowski, Jan and Teubler, Torsten
Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have unique challenges and constraints. Sensor nodes e.g. have tough memory limitations. However, the latest advances in WSN research direct for an implementation of lightweight versions of Internet protocols like IPv6, TCP, and HTTP on sensor nodes. These protocols have challenging requirements. Especially, memory consumption of these protocols is often higher than the physical RAM that microcontrollers have integrated. Therefore, we suggest an approach for virtual memory providing more memory than the available RAM. As microcontrollers do not include a memory management unit the usage of memory is implemented in cooperative fashion based on the C standard library function malloc and free. We suggest an underlying file system and a hardware abstraction layer to support various external or internal memory devices like Flash or EEPROM. In this work in progress we present an API, some implementation details and preliminary results including future work.
08 / 2010
proceedings
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
186-189
Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
