Hardware reconfigurable wireless sensor network node with power and area efficiency

For wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is constantly demanded to process information more rapidly with less energy and area cost. Currently, processor based solutions have difficult to achieve high processing speed with low-power consumption. A novel partial dynamic reconfiguration-based WSN node is proposed in this study. First, a node architecture is described, which contains a processor and reconfigurable hardware (HW). The reconfigurable area can be dynamically and remotely reconfigured. Then the associated design and work flow are presented. As the compiled configuration file is pre-stored in the node. For a new configuration, only the related signal is transmitted to initiate the reconfiguration. To demonstrate the benefits of our approach, four typical test cases are selected and used to evaluate our reconfigurable HW. Compared with the software approach, apart from the performance improvement, power and area saving are also demonstrated in this study. Furthermore, each node can be maintained during its lifetime.