- it is based on two observation regarding sensor network application: : they are event driven and support multiple streams of data.
- TinyOS programs are driven by a event/command interface, supporting fast event executing.
- it provides parallelism by cooperative scheduling. The simple nature of TinyOS makes it very light and independent of hardware features of a particular platform.
I hope my answer helps, but a I think it depends on the amount of processing you want for each node to do. I think an arduino won't be enough if you want heavy processing. An OS can help in that way, using heavy processing.