Powering the Internet of Things with RIOT: Why? How? What is RIOT?

The crucial importance of software platforms was highlighted by recent events both at the political level (e.g. renewed calls for digital data and operating system " sovereignty " , following E. Snowden's revelations) and at the business level (e.g. Android generated a new industry worth tens of billions of euros yearly). In the IoT, which is expected to generate business at very large scale, while threatening even more individual privacy, such aspects will be exacerbated. The need for an operating system like RIOT [1] [2] stems from this context, as outlined in the following. Despite enormous expectations for the Internet of Things [3], there is so far no de facto standard software platform to program most IoT devices, which are constrained in resources such as CPU, memory, energy. IoT software platforms thus face conflicting requirements : interoperability with the Internet, memory-constrained embedded programming, and portable, open-source code. Such limitations and requirements are expected to last [4], and make impossible the use of traditional platforms such as Linux or derivatives, e.g. Android. In effect, the anticipated IoT industry depends on the emergence of standard software platforms for IoT devices. In this context, it is vital that a strong alternative emerges which can achieve the following goals: • allow long-term IoT software security and robustness, • enable trust, transparency and the protection of IoT users' privacy, • accelerate innovation by spreading IoT software development costs, • reduce environmental impact by preventing IoT device lock-down.