RIOT and OpenWSN 6TiSCH: Happy Together

Short development cycles, application-field diversity, and requirements on network size or reliability put an ever increasing strain on Internet of Things (IoT) application developers. Real-time embedded operating systems (RTOS) aim to provide a key set of features, abstractions and services that enable faster development. To fulfill the promise of wire-like communication reliability, wireless standards such as WirelessHART, ISA100.11a and 6TiSCH have been developed and are used in the industry. Keeping these networks synchronized requires precise timing information from the underlying hardware. However, the hardware abstractions of an RTOS do come with an overhead, and the question arises on how these abstractions impact the performance of a complex network stack. To study this, we integrated Open-WSN, a standards-compliant open-source implementation of the 6TiSCH network stack, with RIOT, a prominent open-source RTOS. We compare the minimalistic "bare metal" approach of OpenWSN with RIOT’s full-fledged RTOS environment. We study the impact on network performance, power consumption and real-time application properties. On the one hand, we show that using RIOT to execute a 6TiSCH stack does not degrade power consumption or network performance. On the other hand, we demonstrate how RIOT brings improvements on the time it takes to execute application tasks.