Abstract
In recent years, significant research and development efforts have been made to transform the Internet of Things (IoT) from a futuristic vision to reality. The IoT is expected to deliver huge economic benefits through improved infrastructure and productivity in almost all sectors. At the core of the IoT are the distributed sensing devices or sensor nodes that collect and communicate information about physical entities in the environment. These sensing platforms have traditionally been developed around off-the-shelf microcontrollers. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) have been used in some of the recent sensor nodes due to their inherent flexibility and high processing capability. FPGAs can be exploited to huge advantage because the sensor nodes can be configured to adapt their functionality and performance to changing requirements. In this paper, FlexiS, a high performance and flexible sensor node platform based on FPGA, is presented. Test results show that FlexiS is suitable for data and computation intensive applications in wireless sensor networks because it offers high performance with low energy profile, easy integration of multiple types of sensors, and flexibility. This type of sensing platforms will therefore be suitable for the distributed data analysis and decision-making capabilities the emerging IoT applications require.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) is based on the vision of connecting physical things or objects to the Internet to enable access to distributed sensor data and to provide the ability to monitor and control the physical world from a distance [1]
This paper has presented FlexiS, a high-performance, flexible, embedded sensor node platform based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)
Unlike exiting literature on FPGA-based sensor nodes, this paper has provided the hardware architecture and other design details as well as the implementation of finite state machines
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) is based on the vision of connecting physical things or objects to the Internet to enable access to distributed sensor data and to provide the ability to monitor and control the physical world from a distance [1]. Sensor nodes have been mostly comprised of scalar sensors capable of measuring physical phenomenon such as temperature, pressure, light intensity, humidity, etc These traditional applications do not send a huge amount of data over the network and the information processing that needs to be performed on the sensor node is low. The IoT is increasingly being adopted in diverse fields, for monitoring, alert generation, and remote control, and to achieve advanced control through automatic detection of patterns and prediction of future events (e.g., failure of a machine) [9], potentially delivering significant convenience, efficiency gains, and cost savings Such advanced levels of control rely on intelligent analysis of data obtained from a large number and types of sensors. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the FPGA-based sensor node containing tailored hardware processing elements for various applications including image communication over WMSN with acceptable power consumption
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