Journal Press India^®

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Radio communication exhibits the highest energy consumption in wireless sensor nodes. Given their limited energy supply from batteries or scavenging, these nodes must trade data communication for on-the-node computation. Currently, they are designed around off-the-shelf low-power microcontrollers. But by employing a more appropriate processing element, the energy consumption can be significantly reduced. This paper describes the design and implementation of the newly proposed folded-tree architecture for on-the-node data processing in wireless sensor networks, using parallel prefix operations and data locality in hardware. Measurements of the silicon implementation show an improvement of 10–20× in terms of energy as compared to traditional modern micro-controllers found in sensor nodes.

Keywords

Digital Processor; Parallel Prefix; Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

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