Section: New Software and Platforms

PowWow: Power Optimized Hardware and Software FrameWork for Wireless Motes

Participants : Olivier Sentieys [corresponding author] , Arnaud Carer.

Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Low Power, Preamble Sampling MAC Protocol, Hardware and Software Platform

PowWow is an open-source hardware and software platform designed to handle wireless sensor network (WSN) protocols and related applications. Based on an optimized preamble sampling medium access (MAC) protocol, geographical routing and protothread library, PowWow requires a lighter hardware system than Zigbee [72] to be processed (memory usage including application is less than 10kb). Therefore, network lifetime is increased and price per node is significantly decreased.

Cairn 's hardware platform (see Figure 3 ) is composed of:

• The motherboard, designed to reduce power consumption of sensor nodes, embeds an MSP430 microcontroller and all needed components to process PowWow protocol except radio chip. JTAG, RS232, and I2C interfaces are available on this board.

• The radio chip daughter board is currently based on a TI CC2420.

• The coprocessing daughter board includes a low-power FPGA which allows for hardware acceleration for some PowWow features and also includes dynamic voltage scaling features to increase power efficiency. The current version of PowWow integrates an Actel IGLOO AGL250 FPGA and a programmable DC-DC converter. We have shown that gains in energy of up to 700 can be obtained by using FPGA acceleration on functions like CRC-32 or error detection with regards to a software implementation on the MSP430.

• Finally, a last daughter board is dedicated to energy harvesting techniques. Based on the energy management component LTC3108 from Linear Technologies, the board can be configured with several types of stored energy (batteries, micro-batteries, super-capacitors) and several types of energy sources (a small solar panel to recover photovoltaic energy, a piezoelectric sensor for mechanical energy and a Peltier thermal energy sensor).

PowWow distribution also includes a generic software architecture using event-driven programming and organized into protocol layers. The software is based on Contiki [84] , and more precisely on the Protothread library which provides a sequential control flow without complex state machines or full multi-threading.

To optimize the network regarding a particular application and to define a global strategy to reduce energy, PowWow offers the following extra tools: over-the-air reprogramming, analytical power estimation based on software profiling and power measurements, a dedicated network analyzer to probe and fix transmissions errors in the network. More information can be found at http://powwow.gforge.inria.fr .