Tiny Function-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 characteristic. 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 function-linking scheme. It performs function relocation to decrease program code shift and connects relocated function with a tiny function-linker to eliminate function 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.