The Internet of Things promises to revolutionize how we interact with computers by making embedded computation ubiquitous. New devices will be added to cities, to homes, to factories, to ourselves (inside and out), to cars, and to many other facets of life. The hope is that this influx of technology will help us solve many pressing societal issues in areas such as energy, personal health, the environment, and safety. While there are a range of challenges to enabling this scale, this assignment will focus on the OS environments running on IoT devices. Embedded operating systems and software stacks running on embedded nodes must balance numerous challenges while effectively supporting developers and potential applications. OSes for embedded or IoT devices often operate with very different assumptions and have different constraints than desktop and server operating systems. Embedded devices often are expected to run unattended for months or years, without a user interface, on a minimal energy budget, while responding to application-specific events and using an oftenunreliable wireless network interface.
