An FPGA implementation of an adaptive data reduction technique for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networking (WSN) is an emerging technology that has a wide range of potential applications including environment monitoring, surveillance, medical systems, and robotic exploration. These networks consist of large numbers of distributed nodes that organize themselves into a multihop wireless network. Each node is equipped with one or more sensors, embedded processors, and low- power radios, and is normally battery operated. Reporting constant measurement updates incurs high communication costs for each individual node, resulting in a significant communication overhead and energy consumption. A solution to reduce power requirements is to select, among all data produced by the sensor network, a subset of sensor readings that is relayed to the user such that the original observation data can be reconstructed within some user-defined accuracy. This paper describes the implementation of an adaptive data reduction algorithm for WSN, on a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA. A feasibility study is carried out to determine the benefits of this solution.