Wireless Sensor Networks Node with Remote HW/SW Reconfiguration Capabilities

The inclusion of reconfigurable HW in nodes for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is not a common issue in the framework of the design of state of the art HW platforms for WSNs, mainly due to its high power consumption. But, on the other hand, reconfigurable logic as FPGAs can contribute to improve the system performance by providing not only HW acceleration as it has already been demonstrated by several research groups, but also the possibility of node HW updates after WSN deployment. This paper presents an entire working flow to generate, remotely configure and reconfigure the HW and SW in a reconfigurable node platform for WSNs. The presented reconfiguration working flow targets the custom HW platform designed at CEI (Centro de Electronica Industrial), where the processing is carried out by both a microcontroller and a partially reconfigurable Xilinx FPGA. The presented reconfiguration process is based on the JTAG protocol and thus permits to port the system to new, less power consuming FPGAs that are appearing in the market to solve problems related to energy lifetime