FPGA Based Fuzzy Link Cost Processor for Energy-Aware Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks - Design and Implementation

In recent years, many approaches and techniques have been explored for the optimization of energy usage in wireless sensor networks. Routing is one of these areas in which attempts for efficient utilization of energy have been made. These attempts use fixed (crisp) metrics for making energy-aware routing decisions. In this paper, we have presented the design and implementation of a dedicated fuzzy link cost processor (FLCP) on FPGA. The objective of our FLCP is to determine the value of cost for a link between two sensor nodes such that the life of a sensor network is maximized. The FLCP of the gateway, in WSN, periodically invokes the fuzzy routine to determine the cost of link between any two sensor nodes. Once the costs of all possible links to the single destination (gateway) are computed, the route can then be determined using any shortest path algorithm. We have designed for Spartran 3 - timesc3s50 (50k gates). The maximum clock frequency is 28 MHZ and estimated power consumption is 38mW