Hardware-Software Co-design for Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Sensor Nodes

To meet the needs of innovative sensor network applications, sensor nodes have long evolved from underpowered single microcontroller designs into complex architectures that accommodate multiple processors and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). We address the problem of conceiving and implementing programs for such sensor node architectures. We rely on a universal, layered hardware/software interface that provides seamless interconnection between tasks running on a micro-controller and tasks running on a FPGA. Resource sharing is handled transparently through a shared-bus communication architecture. We demonstrate our methodology, through a heterogeneous sensor node simulator called SUNSHINE [1] for an application running the sensor nodes. We validate SUNSHINE by demonstrating the applications on a multiprocessor sensor node's testbed, which consists of a FPGA, a microcontroller and a radio front-end.