A Domain-Specific Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a new generic sensor node platform for wireless sensor networks (WSN) is presented, demonstrating that high energy efficiency, flexibility and performance can be achieved by the use of dynamically reconfigurable hardware in the WSN domain. The core of the presented platform is formed by the combination of a RISC processor and a dynamically reconfigurable function unit optimized for efficient data processing in WSN applications. A novel reconfiguration mechanism is applied enabling rapid dynamic reconfiguration with very short latencies. Thereby, we can show that the overhead on performance and energy consumption caused by dynamic reconfiguration can be reduced to a moderate, non-critical value and is clearly outweighed by the significantly improved performance and energy consumption for data processing on the reconfigurable function unit. The evaluation of the platform and its comparison to a standard processor-based platform finally demonstrate high gains in energy-efficiency of one to two orders of magnitude.