Netbrick: A high-performance, low-power hardware platform for wireless and hybrid sensor networks

The recent increase in number and complexity of wireless sensor networks (WSN)-based deployments made evident the limits of traditional hardware platforms designed to work in a controlled environment (laboratory) for a limited amount of time. The need for high-performance, low-power, flexible and scalable hardware platforms able to work in real-world (possibly harsh) environments led us to design and develop the NetBrick platform. The novelty and the advantages of the proposed platform w.r.t. other existing hardware platforms reside in: 1) flexibility at the board level (each module composing the board can be enabled/disabled by the software) 2) flexibility at the network level (the NetBrick natively allows for creating wireless, wired and hybrid networks); 3) the high performance guaranteed by the 32bit microprocessor at a very reasonable power consumption thanks to the ultra-low power Cortex M3 architecture; 4) the fine-grain energy management of the board modules (each module provides information about its power consumption), hence allowing the designer for defining advanced energy management policies. The NetBrick platform has been tested with success in a distributed monitoring system for landslide forecasting designed and developed by our group and deployed in the Alps (north Italy).