A novel approach for ultra low-power WSN node generation

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology is now emerging with applications in various domains of human life e.g. medicine, environmental monitoring and military surveillance etc. WSN systems consist of low-cost and low-power sensor nodes that communicate efficiently over short distances. It has been shown that power consumption is the biggest design constraint for such systems. Currently, WSN nodes are being designed using low-power microcontrollers. However, their power dissipation is still orders of magnitude too high and limits the wide-spreading of WSN technology. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach that uses hardware specialization and power-gating to generate distributed hardware micro-tasks. We target control-oriented tasks running on WSN nodes and present, as a case study, a lamp-switching application. Our approach is validated experimentally and shows prominent power gains over software implementation on a low-power microcontroller such as the MSP430.