Runtime Hardware Reconfiguration in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in sensors, low-power system-on-a-chip devices, and wireless communications, have prompted a proliferation of wireless sensor networks. As these networks require advanced integration, intensive onboard processing, and low power consumption, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) emerge as a technology that strikes an optimal balance between processing power, energy requirements, and flexibility. Through the power of reconfigurability, wireless sensor network designs containing reprogrammable logic can be upgraded, errors can be fixed, and limited-resource applications can be dynamically reprogrammed in the field. While powerful, this reconfiguration process can be costly in terms of labor and downtime. In order to address these issues we propose a REWISE framework (Reconfigurable Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks) for real-time reconfiguration of the programmable logic on sensor nodes through the wireless sensor network communication infrastructure.