Prototyping a Wireless Sensor Node using FPGA for Mines Safety Application

The sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network are normally microcontroller based which are having limited computational capability related to various applications. This paper describes the selection, specification and realization of a wireless sensor node using the field programmable gate array (FPGA) based architecture for an early detection of hazards (e.g fire and gas-leak ) in mines area. The FPGAs in it’s place are more efficient for complex computations in compare to microcontrollers, which is tested by implementing the adaptive algorithm for removing the noise in sensor received data in our work. Another advantage of using FPGA is also due to it’s reconfigurable feature without changing the hardware itself. The node is implemented using cyclone II FPGA device present in Altera dE2 board .In this work the network comprises of 4 nodes out of which 2 are test nodes, one routing node and one base station node. An energy efficient MAC protocol is tested for transmitting the data from test node to base station node. Key Words— Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), system on programmable chip (SOPC), FPGA.