Low power node architecture design for mechanical vibration wireless sensor networks

In view of the high energy consumption at the nodes of current mechanical vibration wireless sensor networks, a low power node architecture design was proposed. A low power, high sensitivity MEMS accelerometer was adopted to pick up mechanical vibration signals, which simplifies the power and conditioning circuits; a switched capacitor low-pass filter with adjustable passband was used to realize the dynamic anti-aliasing; a flash storage chip with low operating current was applied to store the continuous and high-rate digital signal streams, which takes into full consideration of the storage speed. A SOC was adopted to act as a whole control core, which controls the acquisition, storage and wireless transmission process. Besides ensuring the mechanical vibration signal acquisition performance, the SOC greatly reduces the nodal size and energy consumption. A comparison between the energy consumption of the proposed low power architecture and a typical dual-core-processor architecture was conducted, and the results indicate that the node based on the proposed low power architecture is of satisfactory low energy consumption performance. © 2017, Editorial Office of Journal of Vibration and Shock. All right reserved.