This article presents the design and implementation of modular customizable event-driven architecture with parallel\r\nexecution capability for the first time with wireless sensor nodes using stand alone FPGA. This customizable\r\nevent-driven architecture is based on modular generic event dispatchers and autonomous event handlers, which will\r\nhelp WSN application developers to quickly develop their applications by adding the required number of event\r\ndispatchers and event handlers as per the need of a WSN application. This architecture can handle multiple events in\r\nparallel, including high priority ones. Additionally, it provides non-preemptive operation which removes the timing\r\nuncertainty and overhead involved with interrupt-driven processor-based sensor node implementation, which is\r\nrequired in real-time wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Thus, higher computation power of FPGAs combined with the\r\nnon-preemptive modular event-driven architecture with parallel execution capability enables a variety of new WSN\r\napplications and facilitates rapid prototyping of WSN applications. In this article, the performance of FPGA-based\r\nsensor device is compared with general purpose processor-based implementations of sensor devices. Results show\r\nthat our FPGA-based implementation provides significant improvement in system efficiency measured in terms of\r\nclock cycle counts required for typical sensor network tasks such as packet transmission, relay and reception.
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