FPGA IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS WITH LOW POWER

 So What is FPGA? 

FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are semiconductor devices that consist of a matrix of customizable logic blocks (CLBs) linked by programmable interconnects. After manufacture, FPGAs can be reprogrammed to meet specific application or feature needs. A hardware description language (HDL), similar to that used for application-specific integrated circuits, is used to specify the FPGA setup (ASIC). Previously, circuit diagrams were employed to define the setup, but with the emergence of electronic design automation technologies, this is becoming less common. FPGAs have a hierarchy of reconfigurable interconnects that allow blocks to be linked together, as well as an array of programmable logic blocks. Logic blocks can be set up to execute sophisticated combinational operations or to behave as basic logic gates such as AND and XOR. Memory components, which might be simple flip-flops or larger memory blocks, are included in most FPGA logic blocks. Many FPGAs can be reprogrammed to execute various logic tasks, allowing for flexible reconfigurable computing similar to that done in software.

Due to their ability to start system software (SW) development concurrently with hardware (HW), enable system performance simulations at an early stage of development, and allow various system partitioning (SW and HW) trials and iterations before final freezing of the system architecture, FPGAs play a significant role in embedded system development.

 

Let us now TAKE A LOOK at the wireless sensor networks

One of the most cutting-edge technologies is "Wireless Sensor Networks" (WSNs). Its applications are quickly entering numerous fields, including agriculture, the "Internet of Things" (IoT), smart homes, e-health, tracking, military operations monitoring, and "Cyber-Physical Systems" (CPS).

With the advancement of embedded technologies and wireless communication, the "Field Programmable Gate Array" (FPGA) has recently emerged as an excellent option for reducing energy consumption and improving the complexity and computing capabilities of WSN's.

We focus on FPGAs used in low-power WSNs in order to incorporate power-aware sensors in this blog. To emphasize the necessity of energy consumption solutions, a comprehensive examination of sophisticated power management techniques is given. Furthermore, we hope that this review will aid in the development of effective power-saving strategies for WSNs based on a customizable FPGA architecture.

The analytical assessment highlighted the unique methods utilized to address the WSN communication and performance problem, including advanced energy consumption reduction and reconfigurability approaches. WSNs typically use a MICROCONTROLLER UNIT(MCU) as a processing core to perform application activities. In many complicated computational scenarios, however, MCUs perform poorly in terms of execution time and energy efficiency. An FPGA may, however, be reprogrammed to adapt to the evolution of a set of requirements, but this takes time and energy. Furthermore, even when flash-based FPGAs provide comparable low-power rates, STATIC RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY(SRAM)-based FPGAs give the best performance for embedded applications.

FPGAs based on flash memory, such as Customizable and trustable end devices, are ultralow-power, however, they lack the performance of SDRAM-FPGA, which is energy-intensive. Only when paired with sophisticated energy management methods, such as the flash-based E2WMSN's reliance on various cores to avoid failures, do they enable real-time reconfigurability. However, the energy quantification for FPGAs based on WMSN on SRAM is not exact, because the FPGA's influence on overall energy consumption is not taken into consideration when it is in sleep mode.

To summarise, while interest in WSN and FPGAs continues to rise, significant efforts are still required to apply FPGAs to energy-constrained WSN devices. In order to differentiate the amount of energy spent by each platform for heterogeneous designs, the quantification of energy must also be assessed in depth. To provide greater energy efficiency for computing-intensive algorithms with substantial degrees of data parallelism, a thorough power-aware management system built-in FPGA is also required.

So concluding the blog, using FPGA in low-power wireless sensor networks has been trending.

This blog is completely based on an internet search and research paper. this article has come to the perceptible conclusion from the study of IEEE paper

R. Chéour, S. Khriji, D. E. Houssaini, M. Baklouti, M. Abid and O. Kanoun, "Recent Trends of FPGA Used for Low-Power Wireless Sensor Network," in IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, vol. 34, no. 10, pp. 28-38, 1 Oct. 2019, doi: 10.1109/MAES.2019.2901134.

Sadrozinski, Hartmut F.-W.; Wu, Jinyuan (2010). Applications of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays in Scientific Research. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-4398-4133-4.

Akyildiz, Ian F., et al. "Wireless sensor networks: a survey." Computer networks 38.4 (2002): 393-422.

Blog Credits : G CHANDRA SEKHAR & K SUJITH SURYA