WISENEP: A Network Processor for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are ad hoc networks comprised mainly of small sensor nodes with limited resources and one or more base stations, which are much more powerful laptopclass nodes that connect the sensor nodes to the rest of the world. The advent of this tecnology over the last decade enables largescale deployment of such sensors. On the other hand, this poses the challenging of how the great amount of information generated by these sensor networks will be handled at the base station. In this paper, we propose a network processor architecture tailored specifically to handling information at sensor network base stations. Our approach optimize information processing by implementing tasks in hardware. We show that the novel architecture is one order of magnitude faster than an architecture based on traditional RISC processor.