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.

IPSN 2010 Demo: An IP-based Sensor Network with Augmented Reality

At IPSN 2010 in April 2010, we presented a demo that show that sensor data from a Contiki sensor network can be displayed on an Android phone using a technique known as augmented reality (two-page PDF demo abstract here). We just made a brief YouTube video that shows the demo. It should be viewable right on this site, or via this YouTube link. Read on for details of the demo.
The idea of the demo is that each sensor is identified with a black and white square "tag" that is recognized in the phone's video by software running on the phone. The software draws a 3d image on top of the tag, giving the illusion that there is a 3D object on top of the tag when the tag is viewed through the phone's screen. Since all sensors are accessible with HTTP over IP, the phone software simply executes a normal HTTP get to access the sensor data. Thus no sensor network-specific code needs to be on the phone, making software development easier.
For details, read our 2-page demo abstract. The full citation for the abstract is:
Dogan Yazar, Nicolas Tsiftes, Fredrik Österlind, Niclas Finne, Joakim Eriksson, and Adam Dunkels. Demo abstract: Augmenting reality with IP-based sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2010), Stockholm, Sweden, April 2010.
[ bib | .pdf ]

Now Available from Amazon.com: Interconnecting Smart Objects with IP - The Next Internet

This morning, the book Interconnecting Smart Objects with IP: The Next Internet, authored by JP Vasseur and I, went from being "Available for preorder" to being "In stock" at Amazon.com! This book is the first comprehensive book on the subject of IP-based smart objects/sensor networks/Internet of things and covers the background and architecture (e.g. ubiquitous computing and sensor networks, IPv6 vs IPv4, IP vs non-IP), hardware and software (e.g. Contiki, uIP), protocols and mechanisms (e.g. RPL routing, 6lowpan header compression, web services), as well as applications (e.g. smart grid, industrial automation, smart cities).

See the table of contents, read the full chapter 3 (PDF), read excerpts from all chapters, or get your own copy!

Talk on IP-based sensor Networks and the Internet of Things

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk on IP-based sensor networks and the Internet of Things at the SUNET gathering in Växjö, Sweden. The talk was recorded on video and is now available online.