The Influence of Microprocessor Instructions on the Energy Consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks

The field of low power compilation could be applied to sensor networks to yield significant savings for the sensing, computation, and communications processes in sensor networks. Such savings could come via simple low power savings flags for future compilers used by sensor network developers. In this paper, we instrument the Moteiv Tmote Sky as a representative sensor, and conduct a set of experiments to study the impact of instruction types, circuit state effects, instruction operand ordering, memory addressing modes, and existing GCC compiler optimization flags on energy consumption. We apply a simple instruction exchange technique to an existing sensor application for a modest gain in energy savings.

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