Evaluating the Use of Motes and TinyOS for a Mobile Sensor Platform

Monitoring containers during transport in a secure, tamper resistant, and reliable manner, is the subject of the IBM Secure Trade Lane project (STL). We have evaluated a platform based on motes (i.e. very small computers) and TinyOS as the base for communication in STL. We implemented an IEEE 802.15.4 full functional device (FFD) MAC layer with beacon support, and we discovered that running this MAC layer was too much for the motes. We saw starvation and we experienced a far too slow data transfer between layers in TinyOS. We tried to overcome the starvation problems by introducing means to limit the high number of timer interrupts required by the MAC layer. Our approach is called Adaptive Timer Resolution, but it did not solve our problems in this case. We concluded that motes and TinyOS are insufficient for the 802.15.4 FFD MAC layer and that this platform is having problems running applications with a high frequency of interrupts, and still execute useful code in between. Our contributins are the evaluation of the mote platform by pushing it beyond its limits and our timer resolution control mechanism Adaptive Timer Resolution.