A comparison of software platforms for Wireless Sensor Networks: MANTIS, TinyOS and ZigBee

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by very tight code size and power constraints, and by a lack of well-established standard software development platforms such as Posix. In this paper, we present a comparative study between a few fairly different such platforms, namely MANTIS, TinyOS and ZigBee, when considering them from the application developer’s perspective, i.e. by focusing mostly on functional aspects, rather than on performance or code size. In other words, we compare both the tasking model used by these platforms and the API libraries they offer. Sensor network applications are basically event based, so most of the software platforms are also built on considering event handling mechanism, however some use a more traditional thread based model. In this paper, we consider implementations of a simple generic application in MAN- TIS, TinyOS and the Ember ZigBee development framework, with the goal of depicting major differences between these platforms, and suggesting a programming style aimed at maximizing portability between them.