Design of a WSN Platform for Long-Term Environmental Monitoring for IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a virtual view, via the Internet Protocol, to a huge variety of real life objects, ranging from a car, to a teacup, to a building, to trees in a forest. Its appeal is the ubiquitous generalized access to the status and location of any "thing" we may be interested in. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are well suited for long-term environmental data acquisition for IoT representation. This paper presents the functional design and implementation of a complete WSN platform that can be used for a range of long-term environmental monitoring IoT applications. The application requirements for low cost, high number of sensors, fast deployment, long lifetime, low maintenance, and high quality of service are considered in the specification and design of the platform and of all its components. Low-effort platform reuse is also considered starting from the specifications and at all design levels for a wide array of related monitoring application

Dynamic Trace-Based Data Dependency Analysis for Parallelization of C Programs

Writing parallel code is traditionally considered a difficult task, even when it is tackled from the beginning of a project. In this paper, we demonstrate an innovative toolset that faces this challenge directly. It provides the software developers with profile data and directs them to possible top-level, pipeline-style parallelization opportunities for an arbitrary sequential C program. This approach is complementary to the methods based on static code analysis and automatic code rewriting and does not impose restrictions on the structure of the sequential code or the parallelization style, even though it is mostly aimed at coarse-grained task-level parallelization. The proposed toolset has been utilized to define parallel code organizations for a number of real-world representative applications and is based on and is provided as free source

Algorithm validation and hardware design interactive approach

In this paper we will describe a modality to speed up the design of the VLSI digital (mainly DSP) circuits and to reduce the design errors by increasing the interaction between the ad-hoc software program developed to validate the algorithm and the VHDL description and simulation. A real case of a digital power analyzer will be used for exemplificatio

A high precision power supply meter

This paper describes an efficient implementation of a power supply meter. The implementation is based on the Fourier Series decomposition algorithm, using CORDIC algorithm for complex mathematical computations. It is able to calculate RMS and peak values, phase shift, power factor, and complex, active, and reactive power for two periodic waveforms up to the 25th harmonic. Several implementation alternatives are compared pointing out the advantages and the disadvantages of each one. Then the circuit structure at block level is described with emphasis on the advantages resulted from the use of CORDIC algorithm, followed by some considerations over precision issues

SystemC Model Generation for Realistic Simulation of Networked Embedded Systems

Verification and design-space exploration of today's embedded systems require the simulation of heterogeneous aspects of the system, i.e., software, hardware, communications. This work shows the use of SystemC to simulate a model-driven specification of the behavior of a networked embedded system together with a complete network scenario consisting of the radio channel, the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for wireless personal area networks and concurrent traffic sharing the medium. The paper describes the main issues addressed to generate SystemC modules from Matlab/Stateflow descriptions and to integrate them in a complete network scenario. Simulation results on a healthcare wireless sensor network show the validity of the approach

Fast switched current analog memory

In this paper is presented the structure of a fast Switched Current (SI) analog memory and its integration with a high energy nuclear physics experiment equipment. A special emphasis is focused on the structure of the elementary memory cell, the SI flash A/D converter, and the sampling commands generation. There can be found also a short comparation of the SI and SC techniques for analog memories

A BiCMOS current carrier transceiver on low voltage power lines

This paper presents a BiCMOS technology project of a Current Carrier Transceiver (CCT) for data and digital broadcasting on Low Voltage (LV) power lines (230-240~Vac). The CCT is the central piece in using the LV power lines network as communication channel for various "intelligent" sensors, actuators, monitors, and remote control for domotic or industrial purpose

A BiCMOS current carrier transceiver on low voltage power lines

This paper presents a BiCMOS technology project of a Current Carrier Transceiver (CCT) for data and digital broadcasting on Low Voltage (LV) power lines (230-240~Vac). The CCT is the central piece in using the LV power lines network as communication channel for various "intelligent" sensors, actuators, monitors, and remote control for domotic or industrial purpose

Network-aware design-space exploration of a power-efficient embedded application

The paper presents the design and multi-parameter optimization of a networked embedded application for the health-care domain. Several hardware, software, and application parameters, such as clock frequency, sensor sampling rate, data packet rate, are tuned at design- and run-time according to application specifications and operating conditions to optimize hardware requirements, packet loss, power consumption. Experimental results show that further power efficiency can be achieved by considering also communication aspects during design space exploratio