Using Reconfigurable Hardware Devices in WSNs for Reducing the Energy Consumption of Routing and Security Tasks

As Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) expand their reach, their applications require lower energy consumption than those provided by current offerings. In this paper, a novel platform is introduced, which employs a reconfigurable device (CPLD) in order to enhance the processing power of typical sensor nodes and, more importantly, reduce the overall energy consumption in common tasks such as routing and security. Our real-world measurements, demonstrate that the proposed system can reduce the energy consumption of the Cost Estimation algorithm of the widely used XMesh routing protocol by 71.5%. Higher energy conservations (more than 90%) can be achieved at Blowfish Encryption, when this is implemented on our new platform.