Architecture of Wireless Sensor Nodes for Water Monitoring Applications: From Microcontroller-based System to SoC Solutions

摘要

A significant amount of research and development work has been initiated by several research groups in the recent years to tackle the issue of water monitoring. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is predominantly used for water monitoring application. Depending on the application constraints and performance required, different implementations are considered for the development of wireless sensor nodes for water monitoring applications. Some are based on microcontroller, digital signal processor (DSP), application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), field programmable gate array (FPGA), system-on-chip (SoC), programmable system-on-chip (PSoC) or a combination of these technologies. This paper presents a survey of state-of-the-art research on sensor node technologies used for water monitoring which includes pipeline monitoring, fresh water monitoring for quality and composition. The relative strengths and weaknesses of microcontroller, DSP, ASIC and FPGA-based wireless sensor nodes for water monitoring applications are presented. Finally, a fully-integrated energy aware SoC solution using reconfigurable hardware is proposed to achieve optimal results.