Hardware-Software Co-Design for Sensor Nodes in Wireless Networks

Author:

Zhang, Jingyao [claim]

Description:

Simulators are important tools for analyzing and evaluating different design options for wireless sensor networks (sensornets) and hence, have been intensively studied in the past decades. However, existing simulators only support evaluations of protocols and software aspects of sensornet design. They cannot accurately capture the significant impacts of various hardware designs on sensornet performance. As a result, the performance/energy benefits of customized hardware designs are difficult to be evaluated in sensornet research. To fill in this technical void, in first section, we describe the design and implementation of SUNSHINE, a scalable hardware-software emulator for sensornet applications. SUNSHINE is the first sensornet simulator that effectively supports joint evaluation and design of sensor hardware and software performance in a networked context. SUNSHINE captures the performance of network protocols, software and hardware up to cycle-level accuracy through its seamless integration of three existing sensornet simulators: a network simulator TOSSIM, an instruction-set simulator SimulAVR and a hardware simulator GEZEL. SUNSHINE solves several sensornet simulation challenges, including data exchanges and time synchronization across different simulation domains and simulation accuracy levels. SUNSHINE also provides hardware specification scheme for simulating flexible and customized hardware designs. Several experiments are given to illustrate SUNSHINE's simulation capability. Evaluation results are provided to demonstrate that SUNSHINE is an efficient tool for software-hardware co-design in sensornet research. Even though SUNSHINE can simulate flexible sensor nodes (nodes contain FPGA chips as coprocessors) in wireless networks, it does not estimate power/energy consumption of sensor nodes. So far, no simulators have been developed to evaluate the performance of such flexible nodes in wireless networks. In second section, we present PowerSUNSHINE, a power- and energy-estimation tool that fills the void. ...

Publisher:

Virginia Tech

Contributors:

Electrical and Computer Engineering ; Yang, Yaling ; Cao, Yang ; Park, Jung-Min ; Hou, Yiwei Thomas ; Schaumont, Patrick R.

Year of Publication:

2013-06-11

Document Type:

Dissertation ; [Doctoral and postdoctoral thesis]

Subjects:

Sensor networks ; multiprocessor sensor node ; Field programmable gate arrays ; simulator ; hardware-software co-design ; power/energy estimation ; testbeds

DDC:

004 Data processing & computer science (computed) ; 620 Engineering & allied operations (computed)

Rights:

In Copyright ; http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Relations:

vt_gsexam:890 ; http://hdl.handle.net/10919/50972

URL:

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/50972

Content Provider:

VTechWorks (VirginiaTech)