Abstract
Over the past decade, wireless sensor network research primarily relied on highly-integrated commercial off-the-shelf radio chips. The rigid silicon implementation of the radio stack restricted access to the lower layers; thus, research focused mainly on the medium access control (MAC) layer and above. SRAM field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based software-defined radios (SDR), on the other hand, provide a flexible architecture to experiment with any and all layers of the radio stack, but usually require desktop computers and draw high currents that prohibit mobile or longer-term outdoor deployments. To address these issues, we have developed a modular flash FPGA-based wireless research platform, called Marmote SDR, that has computational resources comparable to those of SRAM FPGA-based radio platforms, but at a reduced power consumption, with duty cycling support. We discuss the design decisions underlying Marmote SDR and evaluate its power consumption. Furthermore, we present and evaluate an asynchronous and multiple access communication protocol specifically designed for data-gathering wireless sensor networks.
Highlights
Wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes of the past decade have traditionally been designed with a simple system concept in mind: application-specific sensors attached to a general platform that provides computational resources and wireless connectivity
Long-term deployed WSN nodes face ultra-low-power requirements that have been combated on several fronts in the past decade
Power consumption of computational resources has been rapidly reduced through advances in semiconductor process technology, but the same does not hold for the radio communication interface
Summary
Wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes of the past decade have traditionally been designed with a simple system concept in mind: application-specific sensors attached to a general platform that provides computational resources and wireless connectivity. We argue that communication-related power saving in WSNs can go beyond designing scheduling schemes defined over packet transmissions; energy consumption may be reduced significantly by tailoring the MAC and physical (PHY) layers of the communication protocol stack to a specific. We present a WSN research platform that provides access to the lower layers of the communication protocol stack with the design speed and flexibility of FPGA-based SDRs and, at the same time, allows for deployed battery-based operation spanning multiple days.
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