System Level Synthesis for Ultra Low-Power Wireless Sensor Nodes

Engineering hardware platform for a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) node is known to be a tough challenge, as the design must enforce many severe constraints, among which energy dissipation is by far the most challenging one. Today, most of the WSN node platforms are based on low cost and low-power programmable micro controllers, even if it is acknowledged that their energy efficiency remains limited and hinders the wide-spreading of WSN to new applications. In this paper, we propose a complete system level flow for an alternative approach based on the concept of hardware micro-tasks, which relies on hardware specialization and power gating to dramatically improve the energy efficiency of the computational part of the node. Early estimates show power saving by more than one order of magnitude over MCU-based implementations.

[1]  Ludovic L'Hours.  Generating efficient custom FPGA soft-cores for control-dominated applications , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architecture Processors (ASAP'05).

[2]  Santanu Chattopadhyay,et al.  Integrated Power-Gating and State Assignment for Low Power FSM Synthesis , 2008, 2008 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI.

[3]  Jan M. Rabaey,et al.  Power-efficient rendez-vous schemes for dense wireless sensor networks , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37577).

[4]  David E. Culler,et al.  TinyOS: An Operating System for Sensor Networks , 2005, Ambient Intelligence.

[5]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[6]  M. Minuth,et al.  SenseBench: toward an accurate evaluation of sensor network processors , 2005, IEEE International. 2005 Proceedings of the IEEE Workload Characterization Symposium, 2005..

[7]  Sebastian Wallner.  A configurable system-on-chip architecture for embedded and real-time applications: concepts, design and realization , 2005, J. Syst. Archit..

[8]  Jeff Rose,et al.  MANTIS OS: An Embedded Multithreaded Operating System for Wireless Micro Sensor Platforms , 2005, Mob. Networks Appl..

[9]  Mani Srivastava,et al.  Energy efficient routing in wireless sensor networks , 2001, 2001 MILCOM Proceedings Communications for Network-Centric Operations: Creating the Information Force (Cat. No.01CH37277).

[10]  Frederic T. Chong,et al.  Exploring the Processor and ISA Design for Wireless Sensor Network Applications , 2008, 21st International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSID 2008).

[11]  Adam Dunkels,et al.  Contiki - a lightweight and flexible operating system for tiny networked sensors , 2004, 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks.

[12]  Olivier Berder,et al.  Cooperative MIMO Schemes Optimal Selection for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2007, 2007 IEEE 65th Vehicular Technology Conference - VTC2007-Spring.

[13]  Philip Levis,et al.  Usenix Association 8th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation 323 Quanto: Tracking Energy in Networked Embedded Systems , 2022 .

[14]  Pradip Bose,et al.  Microarchitectural techniques for power gating of execution units , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8758).

[15]  David E. Culler,et al.  Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks , 2004, SenSys '04.

[16]  Olivier Sentieys,et al.  A complete design-flow for the generation of ultra low-power WSN node architectures based on micro-tasking , 2010, Design Automation Conference.