access icon free Performance study of real-time operating systems for internet of things devices

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Received 11/04/2017, Accepted 13/01/2018, Revised 13/12/2017, Published 19/01/2018

The development of constrained devices for the internet of things (IoT) presents lots of challenges to software developers who build applications on top of these devices. Many applications in this domain have severe non-functional requirements related to timing properties, which are important concerns that have to be handled. By using real-time operating systems (RTOSs), developers have greater productivity, as they provide native support for real-time properties handling. Some of the key points in the software development for IoT in these constrained devices, like task synchronisation and network communications, are already solved by this provided real-time support. However, different RTOSs offer different degrees of support to the different demanded real-time properties. Observing this aspect, this study presents a set of benchmark tests on the selected open source and proprietary RTOSs focused on the IoT. The benchmark results show that there is no clear winner, as each RTOS performs well at least on some criteria, but general conclusions can be drawn on the suitability of each of them according to their performance evaluation in the obtained results.

Inspec keywords: software engineering; operating systems (computers); real-time systems; Internet of Things; performance evaluation; public domain software; benchmark testing

Other keywords: software development; real-time properties handling; performance evaluation; real-time operating systems; proprietary RTOS; productivity; nonfunctional requirements; Internet of Things devices; benchmark tests; constrained IoT devices; open source RTOS; timing properties

Subjects: Performance evaluation and testing; Computer communications; Software engineering techniques; Mobile, ubiquitous and pervasive computing; Operating systems; Computer networks and techniques

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