Feasibility Analysis of Reconfigurable Computing in Low-Power Wireless Sensor Applications

With increasing complexity of sensor network applications, the trade-off between node-local processing and transmission of data to a central node for handling becomes more significant. For distributed structural health monitoring applications (SHM), we consider different realization choices of the underlying wireless sensor network and implement a key part of the application (a high-order filter) on the novel HaLoMote architecture, a reconfigurable wireless sensor node (rWSN) with FPGAbased processing capability. We compare different tool flows supporting development of algorithms above the RTL regarding to achievable area and energy efficiency and outline the advantage of rWSN over traditional MCUand DSP-based sensor systems in this scenario.