Sensor Network Optimizations by Power Simulation

01.04.2008 - 31.03.2011
Research funding project
Though significant research and development efforts have been spent on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology during the last years, broad commercialization is still missing and the market just slowly adopts WSN technology. One key factor that prevents these markets of high economic and socio-economic relevance to take off is the demanded but yet not reached energetic autonomy of sensor nodes and networks. The present state is still unsatisfactory for many potential application fields such as industrial control, environmental monitoring, health&fitness, sensing, controlling and diagnostics in automotive and aeronautic vehicle environments, guidance&control systems in automatic manufacturing environments and container and item tracking. This innovation project addresses novel power and energy optimization techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks, which target to reach reasonable maintenance-free lifecycles of low-cost sensor nodes by utilizing optimization potential at component and methodological level. The objective of this innovation project, which is in line and tightly coupled to research activities on European level, is to investigate and develop => a novel and comprehensive design methodology to enable the architectural design space exploration of heterogeneous SoCs and SiPs in terms of power and energy. This includes the definition, the virtual prototyping, and the analysis of such systems that combine analogue, mixedsignal, and RF hardware with intellectual property (IP) blocks, programmable architectures, and embedded firmware/software. => ultra low power and reconfigurable building blocks to leverage advanced power management techniques for efficient resource activation within SoCs. The energy efficiency of a sensor node will be increased by prolonging deep-sleep or power-down phases of those SoC subsystems, which significantly contribute to power consumption. Finally, our goal is to demonstrate the improvements by means of a WSN-node prototype in a novel automotive Wireless Sensor Network scenario.

People

Project leader

Project personnel

Institute

Grant funds

  • FFG - Österr. Forschungsförderungs- gesellschaft mbH (National) Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Research focus

  • Computer Engineering: 30%
  • Sensor Systems: 30%
  • Modeling and Simulation: 40%

Keywords

GermanEnglish
Entwurfsmethodedesign methodology
Ultra Low Powerultra low power
Energieoptimierungstechnikpower and energy optimization techniques
Systems-on-Chip (SoCs)Systems-on-Chip (SoCs)

External partner

  • Infineon Technologies Austria AG

Publications