A modular and power-intelligent architecture for wireless sensor nodes

The current state of the art in wireless sensor nodes, both in academia and industry, is a fractured landscape of designs mostly addressing individual problems. The most common commercial design derives directly from a mote developed at the University of California, Berkeley around 1999, and presents only moderate, incremental improvements over the original design. No designs yet present a comprehensive, intelligent solution befitting a modern system. By using dynamic power management, deep system configurability, autonomous peripheral modules, and multiple CPU architectures, this paper presents a flexible and efficient node architecture. Modules on a sensor node communicate with each other to coordinate their activities and power levels. Special attention is given to power sourcing and distribution. The platform may be configured to efficiently work with most networks, sensor types and power sources due to its improved connectivity and hierarchical design. The resulting Configurable Sensor Node (CoSeN) architecture is competitive with existing designs on price, size and power while greatly exceeding most of them on performance, configurability and application potential. CoSeN is validated through prototype implementation.