Runtime reconfiguration of wireless sensor node using FPGA

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an immense area of exploration and it plays a vital role in today's electronic industry. An application of wireless sensor network will have hundreds or thousands of wireless sensor nodes present in its environment. This makes deployment and support of a WSN a complex task. In this paper the utilization of runtime reconfigurability in wireless sensor network is being explored. Here the commercially available reconfigurable device Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used for runtime reconfiguration. The target device used here is Virtex-4 FPGA. Here a single wireless sensor node with two analog sensor, two digital sensors and two actuators is taken for the development of a wireless sensor node and it is programmed in a wireless sensor network with the help of a remote system. In the system the single node is divided into two modules one fixed and the other reconfigurable. The reconfigurable module is partially reconfigured into the system while the fixed part is in function in the end node.