RESENSE: An Innovative, Reconfigurable, Powerful and Energy Efficient WSN Node

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently enjoyed a tremendous rise in popularity. The current WSN node offerings, however, need both increased processing power and lower energy consumption in order to enable the full potential of such networks. To address these requirements, we explore the benefits of an innovative platform which combines a standard wireless node with very low cost reconfigurable hardware. In order to evaluate the efficiency of this pioneering approach three different networking and security protocols have been implemented on the present system: a) Turbo coding, b) Blowfish encryption and c) XMesh routing. Our real-world experiments demonstrate that our prototype system provides comparable performance to the existing microcontroller-based schemes (while in its productized version it could potentially be much faster) whereas, and more importantly, its overall energy consumption is from 70% to 93% lower than that triggered when a very widely used commercial WSN node is executing the exact same processing tasks.