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The MANTIS Group at CU Boulder has developed an open source, multi-threaded operating system written in C for wireless sensor networking platforms. Some key features of MANTIS OS (MOS):

• Developer friendly C API with Linux and Windows development environments
• Automatic preemptive time slicing for fast prototyping
• Diverse platform support including MICA2, MICAz, and TELOS motes
• Energy-efficient scheduler for duty-cycle sleeping of sensor node
• Small footprint (less than 500B RAM, 14KB flash)
• BSD License

For more information about MOS, read our ACM MONET journal article on MOS.



(10/19/2007) MOS 1.0 beta Released!
MOS 1.0 beta has been released! New in 1.0-beta:

• Improved stability, bug fixes.
• CTP, the Collection Tree Protocol (MicaZ/telosb only)
• BSD license

You can find MOS 1.0-beta on the Downloads page. The Linux tarballs and Windows installer have been updated to include this new version. Please report any problems or bugs to the mantis-users mailinglist.

(7/25/2007) License Change
The latest (unstable) version of MANTIS is now available under the BSD license; future stable releases will also use the BSD license. The current stable version (0.95) remains available under the previous eCOS-style license.

(2/12/2007) Website Update
The MANTIS Website is getting an upgrade! Please be patient for the next few days while content from our old site migrates over to the new site.

(6/20/2006) FireWxNet Wins Best Paper Award at ACM MobiSys!

A deployment of MOS called FireWxNet won the Best Paper Award at MobiSys 2006. MOS was deployed during August/September 2005 in the Bitterroot National Forest in Idaho, as part of a collaboration with the University of Montana. A hybrid network consisting of three MOS wireless sensor networks supported by an 802.11 backbone was deployed in the presence of active wildfires over mountainous forested terrain to monitor weather conditions. This work was also publicized in the CU Boulder Alumni magazine as well as the University of Montana's campus Vision magazine, and also in a technical report. Click here for Talk Slides and Data Traces about FireWxNet. We are happy to report that MOS operated well in this extremely rugged test of its kernel, networking, duty cycling, and application support capabilities.

(5/30/2006) TinyMOS Framework for Evolving TinyOS
We published a paper at EmNets 2006 in which MOS is used as a framework for evolving TinyOS. We demonstrated running TinyOS as a thread within MOS, hence the name TinyMOS. TinyMOS adds priorities and multithreading to TinyOS using the Mantis operating system. We introduce the concept of slave threads for spawning compute-intensive tasks from the main TinyOS thread. We are working to release the TinyMOS framework this summer 2006.

(07/27/2005) MOS 0.9.5 Released!
The 0.9.5 release is finally out! Go to the Downloads page to grab it and take a look at what is new. Please report any issues to the bug tracker and/or mailing lists.

(06/30/2005) Initial Telos port complete
An initial port of MOS to the Telos Rev. B nodes has been completed. While not yet as full-featured as the Mica2/MicaZ platforms, the kernel and CC2420 are working nicely. Check out the code in our Subversion tree (mantis-unstable).

(11/04/2004) Teaching with MOS
Mantis OS was used to teach the Fall 2004 undergraduate course in sensor networks, CSCI 4830. MOS was deployed to build an indoor sensor network navigation application.

The Mantis research project has been generously supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and IBM.