Hardware support for a wireless sensor network virtual machine

Abstract

Virtual Machines (VMs) have been proposed as an efficient programming model for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices. However, the processing overhead required for VM execution has a significant impact on the power consumption and battery lifetime of these devices. This paper describes the design of a hardware accelerator for Maté, a VM running on TinyOS. While faster execution speed is not important in the WSN applications, reduction in the number of clock cycles for performing the same task results in the lower duty cycle, which in turn saves the power consumption. With the dedicated data path, it is expected that the numbers of clock cycles can be reduced by one to two orders of magnitude compared to the software implementation of Maté.