Toward ultra low-power hardware specialization of a Wireless Sensor Network node (original) (raw)

2009, 2009 IEEE 13th International Multitopic Conference

Research in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology, wireless communications, and digital electronics has enabled the future emergence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). These systems consist of low-cost and lowpower sensor nodes that communicate efficiently over short distances. It has been shown that power consumption is the biggest design constraint for such systems. WSN nodes are being designed using low-power micro-controllers such as the MSP430. However, their power dissipation is still orders of magnitude too high. In this paper, we propose an approach to hardware specialization that uses the power-gated distributed hardware tasks. We target the control-oriented tasks running on WSN nodes and present, as a case study, a temperature monitoring application. Our approach is validated experimentally and shows prominent power gains over software implementation on a lowpower micro-controllers such as the MSP430.

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