In recent years, wireless sensor network has become an important research domain. A typical WSN is a multi-hop wireless network consisting of hundreds or thousands of small sensor devices that are capable of sensing, processing (computing), and communicating. Nowadays WSNs represent a new generation of distributed embedded systems with a broad range of real-time applications. Some of the applications include process control, fire monitoring, border surveillance, medical care, asset tracking, agriculture, highway traffic coordination etc. Such systems need heavy computations & must meet new kinds of timing constraints under severe resource limitations & limited communication capabilities in highly dynamic environments.
In WSN, sensor devices are severely constrained by the resources. They usually consist of a processing unit with limited computational power & limited memory, sensors (including specific conditioning circuitry), a communication device (usually a radio transceiver or alternatively optical) and a power source in the form of a battery. As many of the new applications supporting real time traffic require more memory, it is challenging to design the efficient memory management techniques to support these applications. Although great amount of work is done in this area, still many problems have to be resolved. Especially there are many research gaps in case of memory management for WSN in supporting concurrent applications. In this paper we will discuss about the challenges to be considered while designing the efficient memory management system for these kind of applications & how these issues are handled in various OSs designed for this purpose. Next, we will also consider the further research opportunities in this area.