A Novel Approach for Ultra Low-Power WSN Node Generation

International audienceWireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology is now emerging with appli- cations in various domains of human life e.g. medicine, environmental monitoring and military surveillance etc. WSN systems consist of low-cost and low-power sensor nodes that communicate efficiently over short distances. It has been shown that power con- sumption is the biggest design constraint for such systems. Currently, WSN nodes are being designed using low-power microcontrollers. However, their power dissipation is still orders of magnitude too high and limits the wide-spreading of WSN technology. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach that uses hardware specialization and power-gating to generate distributed hardware micro-tasks. We target control-oriented tasks running on WSN nodes and present, as a case study, a lamp-switching applica- tion. Our approach is validated experimentally and shows prominent power gains over software implementation on a low-power microcontroller such as the MSP430