Tiny module-linking for energy-efficient reprogramming in wireless sensor networks

The remote and automatic reprogramming is an indispensable part in the wireless sensor networks. Especially, the energy saving problem is an important challenge because of a limited energy characteristics. Many kinds of conventional researches about reprogramming have tried to solve the energy saving problem. But they do not consider the energy consumption model and still have inefficient memory access times. In this paper, we propose a tiny module-linking scheme. It performs module relocation to decrease program code shifts and connects the relocated module with a tiny module-linker to eliminate module caller changes. This proposed scheme reduces access times to Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) and program memory during the decoding procedure of the reprogramming. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms the previous reprogramming schemes in terms of the energy consumption.