Computation and energy efficient image processing in wireless sensor networks based on reconfigurable computing

In a wireless sensor network, each node is power-constrained and may need to acquire some raw data of large size (e.g., image data), on which some computation-intensive tasks (e.g., edge detection) will be done. On the other hand, in wireless communication, significant power will be consumed on transferring a sequence of data of large size. Thus, it is of high interest to carry out the sensor nodes' computation-intensive tasks efficiently while reducing the data size for wireless transfer. In this paper, we propose a new design methodology for batch processing of image data in a wireless sensor network, by employing re-configurable computing using FPGAs.