How do you use Contiki?

A lot of people use Contiki for a variety of cool projects and products, but since Contiki is open source, it is difficult to know about them. I (Adam) regularly receive emails from people using Contiki in a variety of fascinating and inspiring projects, and often hear from people I meet about their cool Contiki-projects, but it would be great to get a more structured view of how Contiki is being used.

Are you using Contiki or thinking about using it? If so, it would be great if you could take a few moments of your time to fill out this poll:

How do you use Contiki?

Individual answers will be treated confidentially, and the aggregate results will be posted in early March. Or, if you prefer to not fill out the poll, but still would like to let me know how you use Contiki, feel free to drop me a direct email at adam@dunkels.com! I love to hear about all Contiki-related projects, be it commercial products, hobby projects, academic project, or something completely different!

The poll closes on February 29th 2012, so be quick to answer.

New Contiki Papers

A number of Contiki-related papers have been published recently:

• The ContikiMAC Radio Duty Cycling Protocol (technical report), describes the ContikiMAC protocol and measures its performance. [ bib ]
• A Database in Every Sensor (ACM SenSys 2011), introduces the sensor database concept and the Antelope database management system, which has subsequently been added to the Contiki codebase. [ bib ]
• Lossy Links, Low-Power, High Throughput (ACM SenSys 2011), presents the Burst Forwarding changes to ContikiMAC, which improves both throughput and energy efficiency to the point where TCP is viable for low-power wireless. [ bib ]
• Beyond Interoperability: Pushing the Performance of Sensor Network IP Stacks (ACM SenSys 2011), uses RPL/IPv6 to demonstrate that interoperability is not necessarily binary: interoperable systems may demonstrate performance problems that can be tricky to hunt down. [ bib ]
• A Low-power CoAP for Contiki (IEEE IoTech 2011), presents the Contiki CoAP client. [ bib ]

Contiki 2.5 Released

Contiki 2.5 is finally out! New in Contiki 2.5 are ContikiRPL, the Contiki implementation of the new IETF RPL IPv6 routing protocol, ContikiMAC, a radio duty cycling mechanism that allows routing nodes to keep the radios off for more than 99% of the time, Contiki Collect, a complete rewrite of Contiki’s native data collection protocol, and an implementation of the IETF CoRE CoAP Protocol. Download here. Changelog here.

Updated 12 September 2011: Instant Contiki 2.5 is now available for download.

Recent Contiki-based Research Results

Some Contiki-based research papers have recently been published:

The Announcement Layer: Beacon Coordination for the Sensornet Stack. Adam Dunkels, Luca Mottola, Nicolas Tsiftes, Fredrik Österlind, Joakim Eriksson, and Niclas Finne. In Proceedings of EWSN 2011.

This paper introduces a new layer in the low-power wireless stack: the announcement layer. The announcement layer coordinates and piggybacks beacon broadcasts to reduce both energy consumption and radio congestion. The code is intended to be included in Contiki after the 2.5 release. The paper also presents the first performance results of the ContikiMAC radio duty cycling mechanism. PowerPoint slides are also available.

ContikiRPL and TinyRPL: Happy Together. Jeonggil Ko, Joakim Eriksson, Nicolas Tsiftes, Stephen Dawson-Haggerty, Andreas Terzis, Adam Dunkels, and David Culler. In Proceedings of the IP+SN 2011 workshop.

This paper looks at low-power IPv6 interoperability from a performance perspective. We run Contiki and TinyOS, both running IPv6 with RPL routing, in the Contiki simulation environment and find that although both systems have a good performance on their own, the performance in a combined network can be surprisingly low.

Leveraging IP for Sensor Network Deployment. Simon Duquennoy, Niclas Wirstom, Nicolas Tsiftes, and Adam Dunkels. In Proceedings of the IP+SN 2011 workshop.

This paper studies how the protocols in the low-power IPv6 stack behave during network deployment. In particular, the paper looks at software deployment and demonstrates that a simple mechanism in the ContikiMAC low-power radio mechanism is able to significantly improve throughput with a retained low power consumption.

The Politecast Communcation Primtive for Low-Power Wireless. Marcus Lunden and Adam Dunkels. The ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review, April 2011.

This paper argues that the traditional broadcast primitive sometimes is overkill in low-power wireless networks and argues that there is a need for a new communication primitive, called politecast. A politecast transmission reaches only those neighbors that explicitly listen for it. Politecast transmissions are intended for periodic, but redundant, beacon transmissions.

Announcing the Contiki Wiki

The Contiki team is happy to announce the Contiki wiki, a wiki with documentation, getting-started guides, tutorials, a FAQ, and other information about Contiki! The Contiki wiki can be found at the following address:

http://www.sics.se/contiki/wiki/ We would also like to invite everyone - Contiki developers, Contiki users, or anyone interested in Contiki - to participate in developing the wiki! Contiki and the wiki needs your help to become a high-quality place to turn to for Contiki information.

Upcoming Events of Interest

There are a number of upcoming events that should be of interest to people working with Contiki.

• IEEE DCOSS 2011, June 27-29, Barcelona, Spain. Paper submission deadline 4 Feb 2011.
• IETF/IAB workshop on IP-based Internet of Things, co-located with the IETF 80 meeting, Prague, Chech Republic, 25 March 2011. Position paper submission deadline 11 Feb 2011.
• Tutorial on IPv6-based Internet of Things, co-organized with the IETF/IAB workshop on 26 March 2011, Prague.
• IP+SN workshop on IP-based sensor networks, co-located with IEEE/ACM IPSN 2011, April 11, Chicago, USA. Paper submission deadline 14 Feb 2011.
• Web of things workshop 2011, co-located with Pervasive 2011, San Francisco, USA, 12 June 2011.
• ACM SenSys 2011, November 1-4, 2011, Seattle, USA. Paper registration deadline 1 April 2011, submission deadline 8 April 2011.

In addition, there are two tutorials at ACM EuroSys 2011, 10 April 2011, Salzburg, Austria that are relevant to the Internet of Things, given that one of the most prominent challenges for the future is the huge amount of data that will need to be processed: Data Deduplication - Algorithms and Implementations by Andre Brinkman from University of Paderborn, and Distributed Coordination using ZooKeeper by Flavio Junqueira and Benjamin Reed from Yahoo! Research.

Contiki 2.5 Release Candidate Available

Contiki 2.5 release candidate 1 it out! Contiki 2.5 brings many improvements over previous releases, such as an implementation of the IETF RPL protocol, an experimental implementation of the IETF CoRE CoAP protocol, the new ContikiMAC radio duty cycling protocol, a complete rework of the Contiki collect address-free data collection protocol, as well as a number of new platforms. The purpose of the release candidate is for people to download and test, to help us find any remaining show-stopper bugs.
Download the code here and read on for details.

Update November 7, 2010: an updated version of Instant Contiki is now available here.

Contiki is an open source operating system for wireless sensor networks and the Internet of things. Contiki provides low-power networking for resource constrained systems along with a development and simulation environment that makes research, development, and deployment easy. Contiki contains the low-power wireless Rime communication stack [3], the uIP TCP/IPv4 stack [1], and the IPv6 Ready certified uIPv6 TCP/IPv6 stack [4], complete with 802.15.4 6lowpan header compression and fragmentation.

The Instant Contiki development environment is a single-file download with all Contiki development and simulation tools [6].

Contiki 2.5 is a major update with many important new features. Release candidate 1 is released 3-4 weeks before 2.5 is released and is intended to help find showstopper bugs before the final 2.5 release. The code can be downloaded from the Contiki website.

New features in Contiki 2.5

ContikiRPL

ContikiRPL is an implementation of the proposed IETF standard RPL protocol for low-power IPv6 routing that now is the default IPv6 routing protocol in Contiki [5].

ContikiMAC

The ContikiMAC state-of-the-art low-power listening asynchronous radio duty cycling mechanism is now the default duty cycling mechanism in Contiki.

Contiki collect

Contiki collect is a CTP-like address-free data collection protocol that has been completely reworked to provide a significantly improved performance as well as configurability.

CollectView

CollectView is a Java GUI that is used to set up a Contiki data collection network, either over Contiki collect or over UDP/IPv6/RPL.

Powertrace

Powertrace is an interface to the Contiki power profiling system that allows either real-time inspection or off-line analysis of the power consumption of a sensor network [2].

MSPsim/Cooja

The MSPSim/Cooja simulation environment has received a significant speed-up.

CoAP/REST

Contiki 2.5 includes an experimental implementation of the IETF CoRE group’s CoAP application layer protocol for RESTful interaction with a low-power IP sensor network [7].

New platforms

Zolertia Z1, RedWire Econotag mc13224v, ST Microelectronics STM32w, Sentilla JCreate.

The Contiki Team

Adam Dunkels, SICS; Oliver Schmidt, SAP AG; Niclas Finne, SICS; Joakim Eriksson, SICS; Fredrik Österlind, SICS; Nicolas Tsiftes, SICS; Zhitao He, SICS; Simon Barner, TU München; Simon Berg; Julien Abeillé; Mathilde Durvy, Cisco; Colin O'Flynn, NewAE; Eric Gnoske, Atmel; Blake Leverett, Atmel; Michael Vidales, Atmel; David Kopf; Kasun Hewage, University of Colombo; Zach Shelby, Sensinode; Anthony Asterisk; Raimondas Sasnauskas, RWTH Aachen; Salvatore Pitrulli, ST Microelectronics; Dogan Yazar, SICS; Ricklef Wohlers, Oxford.

References

[1] A. Dunkels. Full TCP/IP for 8-bit architectures. In Proceedings of The International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), San Francisco, CA, USA, May 2003.

[2] A. Dunkels, F. Österlind, N. Tsiftes, and Z. He. Software-based on-line energy estimation for sensor nodes. In Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (IEEE Emnets), Cork, Ireland, June 2007.

[3] A. Dunkels, F. Österlind, and Z. He. An adaptive communication architecture for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (ACM SenSys), Sydney, Australia, November 2007.

[4] M. Durvy, J. Abeillé, P. Wetterwald, C. O’Flynn, B. Leverett, E. Gnoske, M. Vidales, G. Mulligan, N. Tsiftes, N. Finne, and A. Dunkels. Making Sensor Networks IPv6 Ready. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (ACM SenSys), pages 421–422, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, November 2008.

[5] N. Tsiftes, J. Eriksson, and A. Dunkels. Low-Power Wireless IPv6 Routing with ContikiRPL. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (ACM/IEEE IPSN), Stockholm, Sweden, April 2010.

[6] N. Tsiftes, J. Eriksson, N. Finne, F. Österlind, J. Höglund, and A. Dunkels. A Framework for Low-Power IPv6 Routing Simulation, Experimentation, and Evaluation. In Proceedings of the conference on Applications, technologies, a rchitectures, and protocols for computer communications (ACM SIGCOMM), demo sess ion, New Delhi, India, August 2010.

[7] D. Yazar and A. Dunkels. Efficient Application Integration in IP-Based Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the ACM BuildSys 2009 workshop, in conjuction with ACM SenSys 2009, November 2009.