The Internet of Things (IoT) can be roughly divided into four layers: the perception layer, network layer, device management layer, and application layer. Among these, the **perception layer** most vividly reflects the characteristics of IoT. The perception layer consists of various sensors, protocol conversion gateways, communication gateways, and smart terminals. Most of these terminals are microcomputers with computing capabilities. The most important system software running on these terminals is the so-called **IoT operating system**. For the development of IoT, **fragmentation** is a major issue, as chips, sensors, communication protocols, and application scenarios vary widely. For example, wireless communication standards include Wi-Fi, BLE, ZigBee, NFC, Thread, NB-IoT, LoRa, Sigfox, GPRS, and 4G. It is evident that the lack of unified technical solutions and inconsistent architecture hinders the development of IoT and limits the interconnectivity of IoT. However, from existing products and promotional information, the basic technical characteristics are beginning to emerge. In summary, an IoT operating system should have the following technical features:
1. Cross-Hardware Platform
The most important requirement for IoT applications is to run across hardware platforms, meaning that the IoT application programs written can operate on various target hardware devices without needing to be modified or even recompiled. If the development language is not cross-hardware platform compatible and is only developed for one hardware platform, it necessitates separate development and deployment for different CPU types and hardware configurations when facing diverse IoT devices, which clearly does not meet the needs of IoT hardware fragmentation. Due to the diverse hardware configurations of IoT devices, errors caused by hardware-software mismatches will significantly increase. The advantage of using a cross-hardware platform development language is that it can limit the scope of errors, preventing the entire system from crashing due to application-level errors. The Android system adopts a cross-hardware platform architecture, allowing the same application to run on phones with different hardware configurations, greatly reducing the development workload.
2. Object-Oriented Mechanism
Object-oriented programming aims to simulate the real world as closely as possible while coding, processing and analyzing problems according to real-world logic, making it easier to solve large and complex business logic. In the IoT field, object-oriented programming methods enable programmers to understand application scenarios in a way that is closer to the real world, establishing program development models where each object can be abstracted as an object in the programming domain. Through message interactions between different objects, complex application system development can be quickly completed while simplifying the development and maintenance process, reducing development costs, and speeding up development. Compared to traditional modular programming, object-oriented programming is more suitable for IoT application development and holds greater value.
3. Efficient Development Method
C and C++ are closer to low-level design and are excellent choices when very precise monitoring and control of hardware is needed, but this also means that the code written has poor portability. Java, on the other hand, is an object-oriented development language with excellent portability; there is virtually no hardware dependency in its compiler. To achieve precise control over specific hardware parts, Java relies on libraries supported by the hardware and calls generic code from them. Economically speaking, Java is a very powerful language, and an investment in Java code can yield returns across multiple different platforms. Java is also one of the most popular mainstream programming languages today, used in thousands of computer science and electronic engineering projects. Therefore, individuals who understand Java can easily find jobs in the market.
4. Rich Development Components
As the IoT operating system is responsible for the perception and control of application scenarios, the ways of perception vary widely, and the application scenarios are different. Even the simplest IoT devices require both wireless and wired networking capabilities. The diversity of network communication protocols and the complexity of cloud access require IoT operating systems to support a rich set of components, opening up commonly used sensors, networking protocols, and cloud access solutions in component form. Users do not need to worry too much about physical layer functions and can focus on business logic processing, speeding up the time to market for IoT products.
5. Extremely Low Hardware Resource Usage
The IoT is a market with billions of devices, characterized by a wide variety of types and a large quantity, with stringent requirements for hardware costs. This requires the hardware platforms on which IoT operating systems run to not be too high-end, balancing development efficiency and hardware cost.
The fragmentation of IoT will inevitably lead to the diversity of IoT operating systems. In the short term, it will be difficult to form a market dominated by two players like Android and iOS in smartphones. Below is a brief introduction to several IoT operating systems.
1. AliOS Things
A lightweight embedded operating system for the IoT field, building a cloud-integrated IoT infrastructure. Based on the Linux platform, it provides an MCU virtualization environment, allowing developers to directly develop hardware-independent IoT applications and software libraries on the Linux platform and diagnose development issues using PC platform tools such as GDB/Valgrind/SystemTap.
2. Android Things
A branch version of the Android system, similar to Android Wear used for wearables and smartwatches. It uses a communication protocol called Weave to connect devices to the cloud and interact with services like Google Assistant, targeting all Java developers. This operating system supports a range of IoT device computing platforms, including Intel Edison, NXP’s Pico platform, and Raspberry Pi 3.
3. RUFF
Designed for hardware development using JavaScript, it is compatible with multiple platform environments and supports not only embedded Linux but also the MCU domain. It has a vast number of development APIs and can run on common development boards like Raspberry Pi.
4. mbed OS
Developed by ARM, it is designed for IoT devices running ARM processors. It includes C++ application networks, and the company provides other development tools and related device servers. By default, mbed OS operates in an event-driven single-thread architecture rather than a multi-thread (real-time operating system) environment.
5. Titanium OS
This system is designed for embedded development using Java, porting the Java virtual machine to low-resource MCU chips, with the kernel managing the underlying hardware resources, achieving strong scalability. It can trim unnecessary modules at compile time to match the needs of low-end hardware. This not only expands the operational range of IoT applications but also reduces development efficiency and difficulty, rapidly promoting the development of the IoT ecosystem.
From a technical perspective, IoT operating systems are still in the research and development stage, and there is currently no comprehensive commercially applicable standard operating system for IoT. One of the biggest issues in the IoT era is communication—communication between different devices with different standards, as well as communication between software and hardware. The Titanium OS, developed using Java for smart hardware, has made this communication feasible and ensures its effectiveness and efficiency. There are a vast number of Java developers globally; according to Oracle and ARM estimates, there are approximately 450,000 embedded software engineers worldwide, and about 9 million Java developers in the IT industry. This undoubtedly brings tremendous growth potential to the IoT industry.
Source: Electronic Engineering Network
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