Implementation of a Smart Sensor Node for Wireless Sensor Network Applications Using FPGAs

Applications that involve monitoring of environmental parameters require measuring devices to be placed at different geographical locations but are controlled centrally at a remote site. The measuring devices in such applications need to be physically small, consume low power, and must be capable of local processing tasks facilitating the mobility to span the measuring area in a vast geographic area. This chapter presents the design of a generalized, re-configurable, re-programmable smart sensor node using a Zigbee with a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that embeds all processing and communication functionalities based on the IEEE 1451 family of standards. Design of the sensor nodes includes communication, processing and transducer control functionalities in a single core increasing the speedup of processing power due to inter-process communication taking place within the chip itself.