Elastic Nodes for the Internet of Things: A Middleware-Based Approach

The Internet of Things has created a need for embedded devices that, despite being battery powered, can perform complex algorithms when needed. To fulfil this need we present the Elastic Node, a hardware platform that combines embedded field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with conventional microcontroller units (MCUs). These nodes can adapt their processing resources when their requirements change to temporarily allow more local calculations. We propose a minimalistic middleware approach to simplify development for an Elastic Node and present our first results based on a prototype implementation that uses off-the-shelf hardware.