Design and Power Management of a Secured Wireless Sensor System for Salton Sea Environmental Monitoring

An embedded system composed of commercial off the shelf (COTS) peripherals and microcontroller. The system will collect environmental data for Salton Sea, Imperial Valley, California in order to understand the development of environmental and health hazards. Power analysis of each system features (i.e. Central Processing Unit (CPU) core, Input/Output (I/O) buses, and peripheral (temperature, humidity, and optical dust sensor) are studied. Software-based power optimization utilizes the power information with hardware-assisted power gating to control system features. The control of these features extends system uptime in a field deployed finite energy scenario. The proposed power optimization algorithm can collect more data by increasing system up time when compared to a Low Power Energy Aware Processing (LEAP) approach. Lastly, the 128 bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm is applied on the collected data using various parameters. A hidden peripheral requirement that must be considered during design are also noted to impact the efficacy of this method.