nes-proj/doc/contiki-mainpage.txt

/**

\mainpage The Contiki Operating System

Contiki is an open source, highly portable, multi-tasking operating
system for memory-efficient networked embedded systems and wireless
sensor networks.  Contiki is designed for microcontrollers with small
amounts of memory. A typical Contiki configuration is 2 kilobytes of
RAM and 40 kilobytes of ROM.

Contiki provides IP communication, both for IPv4 and IPv6. Contiki and
its uIPv6 stack are IPv6 Ready Phase 1 certified and therefor has the
right to use the IPv6 Ready silver logo.

Many key mechanisms and ideas from Contiki have been widely adopted in
the industry. The uIP embedded IP stack, originally released in 2001,
is today used by hundreds of companies in systems such as freighter
ships, satellites and oil drilling equipment. Contiki and uIP are
recognized by the popular nmap network scanning tool. Contiki's
protothreads, first released in 2005, have been used in many different
embedded systems, ranging from digital TV decoders to wireless
vibration sensors.

Contiki introduced the idea of using IP communication in low-power
sensor networks networks. This subsequently lead to an IETF standard
and the IPSO Aliance, an international industry alliance. TIME
Magazine listed Internet of Things and the IPSO Alliance as the 30th
most important innovation of 2008.

Contiki is developed by a group of developers from industry and
academia lead by Adam Dunkels from the Swedish Institute of Computer
Science. The Contiki team currently consists of sixteen developers
from SICS, SAP AG, Cisco, Atmel, NewAE and TU Munich.

Contiki contains two communication stacks: \ref uip "uIP" and \ref
rime "Rime". uIP is a small RFC-compliant TCP/IP stack that makes it
possible for Contiki to communicate over the Internet. Rime is a
lightweight communication stack designed for low-power radios. Rime
provides a wide range of communication primitives, from \ref rimeabc
"best-effort local area broadcast", to \ref rudolph1
"reliable multi-hop bulk data flooding".

Contiki runs on a variety of platform ranging from embedded
microcontrollers such as the MSP430 and the AVR to old
homecomputers. Code footprint is on the order of kilobytes and memory
usage can be configured to be as low as tens of bytes.

Contiki is written in the C programming language and is freely
available as open source under a BSD-style license.

\section contiki-mainpage-tcpip TCP/IP

Contiki includes the uIP TCP/IP stack (http://www.sics.se/~adam/uip/)
that provides Contiki with TCP/IP networking support. uIP provides the
protocols TCP, UDP, IP, and ARP.

\sa \ref uip "The uIP TCP/IP stack documentation"
\sa \ref tcpip "The Contiki/uIP interface"
\sa \ref psock "Protosockets library"

\section contiki-mainpage-rime Rime

Rime is a lightweight communication stacks designed for low-power
radios. Rime provides a wide range of communication primitives
suitable for implementing communication-bound applications or network
protocols.

\sa \ref rime "The Rime Communication Stack"

\section contiki-mainpage-threads Multi-threading and protothreads

Contiki is based on an event-driven kernel but provides support for
both multi-threading and a lightweight stackless thread-like construct
called protothreads.

\sa \ref process "Contiki processes"
\sa \ref pt "Protothreads"
\sa \ref etimer "Event timers"
\sa \ref mt "Optional multi-threading"

\section contiki-mainpage-lib Libraries

Contiki provides a set of convenience libraries for memory management
and linked list operations.

\sa \ref timer "Simple timer library"
\sa \ref memb "Memory block management"
\sa \ref list "Linked list library"

\section contiki-mainpage-getting-started Getting started with Contiki

Contiki is designed to run on many different \ref platform "platforms". It is also
possible to compile and build both the Contiki system and Contiki
applications on many different development platforms. 

See \ref esb-getting-started "Getting started with Contiki for the ESB platform

\section contiki-mainpage-building Building the Contiki system and its applications

 The Contiki build system is designed to make it easy to compile
 Contiki applications for either to a hardware platform or into a
 simulation platform by simply supplying different parameters to the
 <tt>make</tt> command, without having to edit makefiles or modify
 the application code.

See \ref buildsystem 


*/