Application design and performance evaluation for multiprocessor sensor nodes

Abstract

Currently, the main components of most sensor nodes are a microcontroller and a radio. Their real-time and peak performance would be a bottleneck when executing computation-intensive tasks. Also, energy consumption may be high due to the long task-execution time. Several works [2]–[6] demonstrate that adding a coprocessor would be a solution to the problems. So far, no work have been done to analyze the performance of a multiprocessor sensor nodes with a FPGA coprocessor. In this paper, a design flow for heterogeneous multiprocessor sensor nodes is provided. Then, the performance comparison between multiprocessor and single processor sensor node's time and energy consumption is provided by executing applications on our in-house designed multiprocessor sensor node on a real testbed. The testbed results show that multiprocessor sensor node can either increase sensor node's execution speed or reduce the sensor node's energy consumption when the sensor node executes computation-intensive tasks.