Low-Power Low-Cost Implementation of IEEE 802.15.4 in WiSN SoC Design

摘要

This article presents the hardware software co-optimized implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for a Wireless image Sensor Network (WiSN) node SoC. In order to to minimize the power consumption and hardware software implementation cost, a power and cost aware partition scheme is introduced. Then the optimized hardware accelerator is designed and validated with software driver/stack based on TinyOS platform. The IP is integrated and verified in the SoC for wireless image sensor network. The results indicated that, with 0.58 mm2 area and less than 18 Kbytes driver/stack cost, the hardware /software implementation of IEEE 802.15.4 is better than the most popular implementations in both functionality and code size requirement. Besides, benefited from the co-optimization, the micro controller workload is greatly reduced and the total protocol processing power consumption is only about 3 mW with 12 MHz 8051 processer in typical image transmission scenario, which shows a 40% reduction compared to pure software implementation.