Application design and performance evaluation for multiprocessor sensor nodes

Currently, the main components of most sensor nodes are a microcontroller and a radio. Their real-time and peak performance would be a bottleneck when executing computation-intensive tasks. Also, energy consumption may be high due to the long task-execution time. Several works [2]-[6] demonstrate that adding a coprocessor would be a solution to the problems. So far, no work have been done to analyze the performance of a multiprocessor sensor nodes with a FPGA coprocessor. In this paper, a design flow for heterogeneous multiprocessor sensor nodes is provided. Then, the performance comparison between multiprocessor and single processor sensor node´s time and energy consumption is provided by executing applications on our in-house designed multiprocessor sensor node on a real testbed. The testbed results show that multiprocessor sensor node can either increase sensor node´s execution speed or reduce the sensor node´s energy consumption when the sensor node executes computation-intensive tasks.