Towards a Low Power Virtual Machine for Wireless Sensor Network motes

Proceedings of the Japan-China Joint Workshop on Frontier of Computer Science and Technology (FCST '06), Fukushima, Japan, 17 - 18 November, 2006Virtual Machines (VMs) have been proposed as an efficient programming model for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices. However, the processing overhead required for VM execution has a significant impact on the power consumption and battery lifetime of these devices. This paper analyses the sources of power consumption in the Mate VM for WSNs. The paper proposes a generalised processor architecture allowing for hardware acceleration of VM execution. The paper proposes a number of hardware accelerators for Mate VMexecution and assesses their effectiveness.University College DublinUniversity of Aiz