Image processing capabilities of new generation arm cores for WMSNs

Last decade witnessed the rapid development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). More recently, the availability of inexpensive hardware such as CMOS cameras and microphones that are able to ubiquitously capture multimedia content from the environment has fostered the development of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Nodes in such networks require significant amount of processing power to interpret the collected sensor data. Most of the currently available wireless multimedia sensor nodes are equipped with ARM7 core microcontrollers. On the other hand, ARM9 and ARM11 cores are viable alternatives, which deliver deterministic high performance and flexibility for demanding and cost-sensitive embedded applications. Thus, we evaluated the performance of the ARM9 and the ARM11 cores in terms of processing power and energy consumption. Our test results showed that the ARM11 core performed 3 to 4 times faster than the ARM9 core.