FPGA based wireless sensor node with customizable event-driven architecture

Abstract This article presents the design and implementation of modular customizable event-driven architecture with parallel execution capability for the first time with wireless sensor nodes using stand alone FPGA. This customizable event-driven architecture is based on modular generic event dispatchers and autonomous event handlers, which will help WSN application developers to quickly develop their applications by adding the required number of event dispatchers and event handlers as per the need of a WSN application. This architecture can handle multiple events in parallel, including high priority ones. Additionally, it provides non-preemptive operation which removes the timing uncertainty and overhead involved with interrupt-driven processor-based sensor node implementation, which is required in real-time wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Thus, higher computation power of FPGAs combined with the non-preemptive modular event-driven architecture with parallel execution capability enables a variety of new WSN applications and facilitates rapid prototyping of WSN applications. In this article, the performance of FPGA-based sensor device is compared with general purpose processor-based implementations of sensor devices. Results show that our FPGA-based implementation provides significant improvement in system efficiency measured in terms of clock cycle counts required for typical sensor network tasks such as packet transmission, relay and reception.