A Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerated Platform for Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

With the advent of the FPGA technology, a reconfigurable platform becomes possible to enhance the capability and adaptability of wireless sensor nodes while reducing the energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate the application of reconfigurable platform in wireless sensor networks. We focus on using hardware accelerated lossless compression to reduce the energy consumption of the data aggregation in clustered networks. Our study is based on real-world measurement on our integrated reconfigurable sensor node and the measured data is then used in the network simulation with a proper channel model. Our experiments show that the use of hardware acceleration on our platform can reduce the energy consumption by up to 35%. In addition, with proper parameters of the network, the run-time reconfiguration becomes beneficial and this opens a lot of opportunities for the optimizations according to the field situations.