Low-power IoT systems

Mostly built on top of constrained microcontrollers, such as the Cortex-M0, low-power embedded systems are often little, battery-powered or energy-harvesting devices, sporadically connecting to remote services using wireless technologies. These small, inexpensive systems are often used in install-and-forget scenarios, where they can operate for years on a single integrated power source with nearly no maintenance costs.

Bare-metal architectures are still very popular in these scenarios, however, a few very lightweight operating systems have been designed to organize and synchronize tasks using as few resources as possible, while still keeping a specific focus on power saving and connectivity. The challenge for the development of this kind of operating system is to find a way to fit complex networking protocols into a few kilobytes of memory. Future-proof systems designed for the IoT services offer native IPv6 networking, often through 6LoWPAN, and fully equipped yet minimalist...