Low-Power Low-Cost Implementation of IEEE 802.15.4 in WiSN SoC Design

This article presents the hardware software co-optimized implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for a Wireless image Sensor Network (WiSN) node SoC. In order to to minimize the power consumption and hardware software implementation cost, a power and cost aware partition scheme is introduced. Then the optimized hardware accelerator is designed and validated with software driver/stack based on TinyOS platform. The IP is integrated and verified in the SoC for wireless image sensor network. The results indicated that, with 0.58 mm² area and less than 18 Kbytes driver/stack cost, the hardware /software implementation of IEEE 802.15.4 is better than the most popular implementations in both functionality and code size requirement. Besides, benefited from the co-optimization, the micro controller workload is greatly reduced and the total protocol processing power consumption is only about 3 mW with 12 MHz 8051 processer in typical image transmission scenario, which shows a 40% reduction compared to pure software implementation.