The low power energy aware processing (LEAP) embedded networked sensor system

A broad range of embedded networked sensor (ENS) systems for critical environmental monitoring applications now require complex, high peak power dissipating sensor devices, as well as on-demand high performance computing and high bandwidth communication. Embedded computing demands for these new platforms include support for computationally intensive image and signal processing as well as optimization and statistical computing. To meet these new requirements while maintaining critical support for low energy operation, a new multiprocessor node hardware and software architecture, low power energy aware processing (LEAP), has been developed. The LEAP architecture integrates fine-grained energy dissipation monitoring and sophisticated power control scheduling for all subsystems including sensor subsystems. This paper also describes a new distributed node testbed demonstrating that by exploiting high high energy efficiency components and enabling proper on-demand scheduling, the LEAP architecture may meet both sensing performance and energy dissipation objectives for a broad class of applications.