Building IEEE 802.15.4 Accelerators for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Nodes

Bringing IPv6 connectivity to low-end wireless sensor nodes leads to considerable device resources utilization, e.g., central processing unit and energy, caused by the increased amount of data transferred over the network that needs to be handled. In order to reduce these overheads, this letter proposes an IEEE 802.15.4 accelerator for heterogeneous wireless sensor systems that target the Internet of Things sensing applications, which include on the same node, field-programmable gate array technology beside a microcontroller provided with wireless connectivity. The deployed solution implements the Third-level of filtering specified by the standard, and performs basic packet handling such as the detection of multiple receptions of the same frame. The obtained results show the benefits of including such accelerator on the reconfigurable computing unit, offering nearly 17 of overhead reduction. All filtering functionalities are executed by the accelerator to discard unneeded data frames, which avoids unnecessary interrupts to the operating system and increases the system availability up to 59.