Huawei is coming with an open source operating system for internet-of-things applications that takes up ten kilobytes. According to the company, it is the lightest software of its kind. Huawei predicts that 100 billion devices worldwide will have an internet connection by 2025.
Huawei showed the OS, called LiteOS, at the Huawei Network Congress. That is the company’s own event that takes place in Beijing on Wednesday and Thursday. The event, which focuses on the future of networks and internet-of-things, will feature two hundred presentations by 41 companies.
LiteOS has been in development for some time, but from version 1.0.0 the system must be open source. It is unclear under which license the system will be released. Huawei wants to offer a unified platform that contains the OS, middleware and APIs. The company sees the wide variety of hardware that is used for iot applications as one of the challenges that comes with this. The universal platform should ensure that internet-of-things developers can focus on building applications. The company refers to the ‘Open IOT Community’, a Chinese open source community with Huawei and hardware maker Wrtnode as partners.
The real-time OS can run in conjunction with microcontrollers as well as arm and x86 processors. The OS contains the necessary drivers for this, as well as support for communication standards such as zigbee, lte, bluetooth and wifi. Huawei promises that the 10kB software is not only the smallest OS for internet-of-things applications: the company also says that the energy consumption remains low when running. In addition, the software would support zero configuration, autodiscovery and autonetworking, and be widely applicable. Huawei sees applications in smart homes, wearables and vehicles.
William Xu, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of Huawei, announces LiteOS at Huawei Network Congress.