pRoot: An Adaptable Wireless Sensor-Actuator Hardware Platform

Abstract

The relative significance of available processing/memory resources and cost/power constraints for wireless sensor-actuator nodes depends on the application and use-case scenario. As an example, wireless automation applications usually have diverse processing/memory resource demands and energy constraints, and they bring forth development feasibility as one of the important decision criteria. For similar applications, adaptable platforms, supporting scaling between processing-memory resources and power consumption, and providing flexibility in use-case dependent hardware modifications are preferable. To the best of our knowledge, the available node platforms cannot be easily modified to support resource scaling and hardware flexibility simultaneously. In this paper, an adaptable node hardware architecture is introduced. The proposed platform can be utilized in several of roles for applications with diverse requirements, lowering the development-effort compared to alternative implementations. The practical problems of the architecture are elaborated and the details of their solutions are given. The feasibility of the introduced architecture is shown through an example implementation using off-the-shelf components, the pRoot node.