Experimental Evaluation ofZephyr RTOS on Industrial Embedded Hardware : Latency and power consumption

Sammanfattning

histhesis experimentally evaluates Zephyr RTOS and the proprietary RTOS µRXCon industrial embedded hardware. The study focuses on power consumption andtiming behavior using deterministic workloads on two separate but architecturallyidentical SAT-III units. Power measurements were collected over fixed intervals,while timing measurements included compute latency, context switch latency, Endto-End round trip (E2E) cycle time, sleep duration, and sleep jitter.Theresults show that Zephyr had lower mean power consumption under the testedconditions. µRXC showed lower compute latency and shorter E2E cycle time,whereas Zephyr showed lower context switch latency and substantially lower sleepjitter.The study concludes that neither RTOS is superior in all measured aspects.Instead, suitability depends on application requirements, such as power efficiency,computational latency, synchronization overhead, or timing stability. The findingshighlight the need for controlled experimental evaluation when assessing RTOSmigration in industrial embedded systems.