Dynamic Memory Allocator for Sensor Operating System Design and Analysis

Dynamic memory allocation is an important mechanism used in operating systems. An efficient dynamic memory allocator can improve the performance of operating systems. In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes have miniature computing device, small memory space and very limited battery power. Therefore, it is important that sensor operating systems operate efficiently in terms of energy consumption and resource management. And the role of dynamic memory allocator in sensor operating system is more important than one of general operating system. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic memory allocation scheme that resolves the existing problems in dynamic memory allocators. We implemented our scheme on Nano-Qplus which is a sensor operating system based on multi-threading. Our experimental results and static analysis result show our scheme performs efficiently in terms of the execution time and the memory space compared with existing memory allocation mechanisms.