TinyOS Extensions for a Wireless Sensor Network Node Based on a Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) present design issues and challenges in both hardware and software platform development. This paper presents the implementation of a hardware-dependent component library that extends TinyOS in order to create an abstraction layer on top of a dynamically reconfigurable hardware architecture. Such hardware architecture is based on a SPARC-compliant processor and it is the core component of a generic sensor node platform targeted for future smart sensor networks. Considered as an application programming interface (API), the components of the implemented library allow the application developer to fully exploit the functionality of the dynamically reconfigurable function unit (RFU). Besides the RFU, the library also provides an interface to other standard system peripherals such as a timer, sensor, and radio transceiver. A simple TinyOS application, which includes gathering data from an attached sensor and wirelessly communicating to other sensor nodes has been demonstrated on the prototype nodes. In addition, a software visualization tool has been developed and integrated to a commercial logic simulator in order to facilitate software debugging during the cycle-accurate simulation of the hardware architecture model, described in the VHDL.