Energy Evaluation on a Reconfigurable, Multimedia-Oriented Wireless Sensor

This paper aims to evaluate the energy required on an integrated, reconfigurable wireless sensor node with basic multimedia capabilities. Recently a growing interest is gathered by the development of wireless network made of small, self-consistent sensors with embedded processing capabilities. While the first generation of these devices will deal with small bandwidth signals, it is forecastable that distributed image processing algorithms should be soon needed. Moreover, in order to guarantee a widespread deployment of these sensors, they ought to rely on reconfigurable radio paradigm. Nevertheless energy related constraints should seriously tackle the sensor feasibility. The analysis proposed in this paper relies on the development of a very low-complexity, parametric wavelet transform IP. Starting from an high level description, different implementation on different physical layers have been pursued. The experimental results show that very interesting reduced energy figures can be achieved on modern CPLD devices. This project is partially supported by CERCOM (Center for Multimedia Radio Communications).