Summary Major operating systems for wireless sensor networks (WSN) enforce an event-based programming paradigm for efficiency reasons. However, practice has shown that the resulting code complexity is hard to manage for software developers and leads to difficult problems during development, deployment, and operations. Thus, thread libraries for WSN applications have been introduced, but the efficiency [...]

There is a long-standing dispute on whether and when thread-based programming should be preferred over the event-based paradigm. This dispute has also extended into the wireless sensor networks domain. Many existing operating systems rely on events due to their efficiency, but make code management difficult. Others rely on threads for developer comfort, but at the [...]

Major motes operating systems like TinyOS or Contiki rely on an event-driven programming paradigm. While the use of events allows for limiting memory usage on resource-constrained motes, it may also hamper the development and debugging of applications, especially as their complexity increases [Dunkels2006]. Several authors also investigated the possibility of introducing threads to mote programming [...]