Low power computing for secure and reliable sensor networks

In recent years embedded systems gained lot of attention in many applications such as automotive, medical, multimedia, industrial monitoring and control, etc. The topic of reducing power dissipation in embedded systems has received considerable attention in the recent years. A power driven design methodology is mandatory to meet system level requirements while fulfilling time to market constraint. In this paper we focus on developing cost and power efficient hardware-software architectures for sensor networks which could be used in medical sensing applications. In particular, we aim to realize reliable and secure communications between the 25 mm cube motes developed by Tyndall National Institute. The work presented in this paper provides an insight into the power aware design and implementation of a part of communication system which uses error correction (e.g. Reed-Solomon) and symmetric ciphers (e.g. IDEA-NXT) for resource constrained embedded systems in general and sensor networks in particular.