Configurable Flash Filesystem for Low-Power Sensor Devices

Wireless low-power devices with constrained resources are often used as end points in wireless sensor networks. The advantage when using such devices in a system is low-price, long battery life and small device size. When these devices are required to collect more different data types and store them in a limited on-chip memory, a filesystem is required. In this paper, we present Configurable flash filesystem (CFFS). It is a simple, portable filesystem designed to organize and store as many sensor data on these low-power sensor devices as possible. We analyze more robust solutions for bigger flash memories, filesystems designed for similar low-power devices and provide motivation for our own filesystem design. The paper describes the design of the filesystem and its comparison with two other existing solutions. The experiments show, that for the described scenario of data collection on low-power sensor devices, CFFS utilizes flash memory the most effectively.