2012 Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Environments

First analysis of custom WSN architecture as

hardware for pervasive computing
V.D. Velasco-Martínez, M.J. Flores-Medina and F.G. Flores-García
Departamento de Estudios de Posgrado e Investigación
Instituto Tecnológico de la Laguna
Torreón, México
e-mail: yoalieh@gmail.com

Abstract—This paper introduces some concepts of WSN and

Pervasive Computing, then presents AesSidhe, a WSN architec-
ture currently under design in Instituto Tecnológico de la Laguna.
The features and constraints of the hardware architecture are
described, and the current work in the software architecture
is described and commented. An analysis of usage of the
architecture in pervasive computer systems for three generations
is done after. Finally, the conclusions on the results of the analysis
of the architecture are presented.

Index Terms—Wireless Sensor Networks, Pervasive Computing

I. I NTRODUCTION
A. Wireless Sensor Networks
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a cluster of tiny
devices able to measure, process and transmit real world
variables wirelessly to a data sink [1]. These devices ought to
be autonomous, thus they need a power supply, a measuring
and processing unit and a wireless communication transceiver.
Each device is called a mote, in reference to one of the first
WSN proyects: SmartDust [2].
There are many constraints while implementing WSN in
real world applications. The most important are enhancing
power supply duration and the price of each mote. Actually,
the most implemented power supply are batteries, and having
to change them too frequently or in a large quantity, is
not practical. Energy harvesting has been used to recharge
batteries, or even to replace the power supply [3].
Reduction in the distance between motes permits lower
power transmission while using RF, as energy consumption
rates raise exponentially for longer distances [4]. Wireless Per-
sonal Area Networks (WPAN), as defined by IEEE 802.15.4
standard [5], are good for WSN with a high density mote
count in a range of 40m, or in longer distances by the use of
multi-hop mesh network protocols, as Zigbee [6]. There are
other protocols in development and early use right now. An
example is 6loWPAN, that seeks the presence of the motes
in the Internet by wrapping Internet Protocol v6 packets [7]
inside of 802.15.4 ones.
B. Generations in pervasive computing research
According to Ferscha[8], there are three generations (or
stages) in pervasive computing research. The first , con-
nectedness, refers to networked systems made of tiny and
Figure 1. Mandragora V1 mote picture, and Mandragora V2 3D View
unnoticeable devices, wirelessly connected. These systems can
detect events by using sensors, and actuate according to user
requests. It focuses in each device being able to communicate
with others when they need. WSN and Wireless Sensor and
Actor Networks (WSAN) are examples of systems of this first
generation.
The second generation, context awareness, refers to the
ability of using first generation systems to infer the context
(as defined by [9]) of all entitities involved in the system,
including user, system components and expected use. Ac-
cording to the current context of entities, called a situation,
information and services are presented to users, some activities
are autoexecuted, and current context of entities can be tagged
for a later use.
The third generation, called smartness, consists in the use
of awareness and connectedness of entities to give meaning to
the context of all entities in the system by the use of semantic
ontologies. As there would be many nodes in the area, each
one is an entity, and the whole system works as the interaction
of needs and decisions taken by every entity. This system
requires a larger deployment to be useful, and there is where
projects of smart cities, as Oulu Urban Interactions research
program fit [10].
C. Mandragora and AesSidhe projects
Both projects started development in 2008, at Instituto
Tecnológico de la Laguna, as the need to create a cheap WSN

978-0-7695-4741-1/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE 343

DOI 10.1109/IE.2012.55
  "


 


 "

'(#



 !

 


  


 

 

 



(









 !"
 & 

 %"

$
'(# %




#$% !"
 %$ %
Figure 2. Hardware Top View
infrastructure showed up. Mandragora, the first project, had the
goal of monitoring soil’s water content in a pecan tree field.
As the budget was very low, commercial motes were out of
the scope. New electronic boards were designed as academical
projects [11], [12].
During Mandragora’s development, the benefit to split the
electronic design, coding and application was seen. Front-end
electronic design, operating system, and hardware libraries
were grouped in a new project called Aes Sidhe. Its main goals
are being used as the base architecture of other application
projects, and as a researching resource for programming and
testing WSN protocols.
Mandragora became then the first application of Aes Sidhe
architecture, targeted to agricultural projects. It includes the
back-end electronic design, assembly design, and specific
programming for agricultural sensors. Fig. 1 shows one mote
of the first design, without wires. The next batch, using the
changes in Aes Sidhe, is expected to be ready on the first half
of 2012.
Aes Sidhe is still a work in progress, but the possibility of
being used in different pervasive computing tasks are analyzed
on this paper. This analysis will help with decision taking
during the development of the architecture, to take into account
what is needed for its use as part of a pervasive computing
system.
II. A ES S IDHE H ARDWARE D ESCRIPTION
Aes Sidhe is designed with modularity in mind. Version
2.1, shown on Fig. 2, has 5 primary modules. Some are
communicated by a SPI bus. For each application, modules
can be selected, used, mixed and modified as needed. More
optional modules are in design for foreseen applications, like
the DSP module.
• Microcontroller: It has a PIC18. It uses its internal oscil-
lator in low frequency for power saving mode, and has
the option to enable an external oscillator for fast speed
processing and USB operation. It has a power saving
feature, reducing power consumption to a minimum. It
works as the SPI bus master, and has three 10-bit analog
channels for low quality measurements.
344
Figure 3. Software organization
• Power supply: Designed to work with a single CR232
battery. It has a voltage elevator and regulator, which can
be disabled by the microcontroller.
• Transceiver: It has a 802.15.4-2003 stack in hardware,
and the electronic components needed to couple a 2.4GHz
RF antenna. By design decision, the hardware only com-
plies with 802.15.4 to test different network protocols
over it, as this is a heavily researched topic in WSN.
• Data storage: The microcontroller is limited in EEPROM,
thus it needs an external flash memory, used to store
network routes, among other data.
• Data acquisition: This module has an 8 channel, 12 bit
ADC, with a programmable gain and voltage threshold.
It has three banks of sensor power, and each bank can
be enabled or disabled to save energy. It is to be used in
applications requiring good quality measurements.
III. A ES S IDHE S OFTWARE D ESCRIPTION
The firmware is coded in mikroC Pro for PIC (mikroElek-
tronika, Belgrade, Serbia). It shall consist of a wireless boot-
loader, an operating system (OS), a hardware resource man-
ager, an energy manager, a network protocol, and measuring
and acting applications. Fig. 3 shows the organization of the
software blocks, and how they interact between them. The
bootloader is not shown.
A. Operating System
Aes Sidhe is an embedded system, thus, a monolithic ap-
proach was considered. The OS has all the hardware libraries
needed to access hardware integrated circuits. It makes these
libraries available to the framework. Interrupt routines are
defined in the OS as atomic actions.
A priority aware scheduler is also part of the OS. At the
moment, the response time between tasks to be executed is
176μs when using a 4MHz oscillator. The individual tasks of
each process can request execution to the scheduler, though
the duration of each task is defined in each process.
B. Framework
The main hardware resource conflict happens when using
the SPI Bus because all circuits communicate through it.
  


 




Currently, the resource manager only takes care of the bus,
controlling which device has control over it, and informing  
other processes that the bus is busy and should wait for it.
   
The energy manager will take care of monitoring the use


of battery and, if available, of the harvested energy from the

environment. It allows also to control the hardware resources

to save energy by slowing clocks and turning off unneeded
modules.


One of the main objectives of Aes Sidhe is testing different 
 




 

network protocols, thus a network protocol is not fixed. At this
moment, a flooding algorithm has been used to request data
from specific motes. When other motes in the way receive
a request, they retransmit it back until it gets to its destiny.
The response is retransmitted the same way. Data already
retransmitted is ignored to avoid bouncing.
C. Applications
Acting and sensing applications are processes that use the
framework libraries to achieve the sensing or acting functions
of the motes. The framework will not report capabilities to the
applications, as they can be defined at compile time.
D. Wireless Bootloader
Each mote can have its firmware reprogrammed by a master
node. It saves time when updating the system without moving
motes from their place, and allows fast protocol and appli-
cation testing in a safe way. It uses the Advanced Encrytion
Standard (AES) for security, and memory zones protection to
avoid overwriting the bootloader.
When the mote restarts, the bootloader checks if reprogram-
ming was requested. If it is, it will start listening for the new
firmware data packets. If it is not, it will start normal operation.
IV. A RCHITECTURE C ONSTRAINTS
A. Processor Speed, Calculation Power, and Memory
PIC18F4550 [13] has an 8 bit, RISC, Harvard architec-
ture microprocessor. Oscillator speed can go from 31kHz to
48MHz, and each instruction takes four oscillator cycles to be
executed, meaning 7.75KIPS to 12 MIPS.
An 8x8 hardware multiplier is present in the ALU, allowing
8x8 unsigned integer multiplication in one cycle. Division still
needs to be made in software, and takes a significant time to
be done, as any kind of floating or fixed point operation.
Multiprocessing is not available, and for multithreading
there are three independent threads, the main program, and
two more for low and high priority interrupts. There are no
software interrupts available.
Data memory is 2kB, and program flash is 32kB. There is
not a direct way of executing code in external memories in a
bus, or in data memory, limiting whole code size.
B. Wireless communication
802.15.4-2003 maximum data transfer rate is 250 kb/s,
meaning that the whole wireless traffic in the channel, in a
40m zone is restricted to that. It is able to communicate in
point-to-point and star topologies. It does not has integrated
345
Figure 4. Rerouting and flagging on failure.
mesh topology, but can be programmed in the network stack
by using the promiscuous mode of the transceivers.
V. U SES IN P ERVASIVE C OMPUTING
First, the current architecture will be analyzed from the
perspective of each generation of pervasive systems. Finally,
that can be done with the additional modules currently in
design.
A. Connectedness
With the right routing protocols, Aes Sidhe can be used to
fulfill many tasks of the first generation of devices. Each mote
would keep information of other motes which can be reached
through itself. When receiving data for one of such motes, it
will retransmit it back so the neighbors get the message. This
would be repeated for many hops, until the message gets to
its place. This way data can be sent between all devices. In
case one mote fails, the neighbors would notify that it doesn’t
respond, and erase the neighbor from the list. An algorithm
would trigger so that new routes to motes affected by the
failure are calculated. After this, if there are motes no longer
reachable by new routes, an alert to the user would be issued.
This way, the network tries to stay always available. This
mechanism is illustrated in Fig. 4.
Data aggregation is achievable, though RAM memory needs
to be cared for, because it is not plentiful. At the current
stage of development, the operating system is using half the
available RAM by itself.
The network can get environmental information through
sensors. Some simple actors can be switched to a value (on/off,
analog). Requests from the user can be done through spe-
cialized 802.15.4 devices. Numerical data processing would
be slow because the lack of computing power, but feasible.
Multimedia data could only be captured by specialized sensors
resuming the data, but cannot be processed or transmitted.
B. Context Awareness
From the context awareness focus, Aes Sidhe motes can
sense environmental and devices information, like power us-
age, power supply, data traffic and the like. Motes can be used
as context aggregators. Context can be inferred by application
of single rules with the information about environment and
devices. Information and inferred context can be requested
   
! #$ 

!

power, each mote could be able to analyze its own data and
"
 
 








create simpler abstractions of data and complex signals, which
%&
 


!!
 

could be transmitted in less time. more complex processing
  
!





 could be achieved using WDC. More complex rules could be
 '
 



  


created with this extra processing. By using a common middle-
ware, both WDC and distributed context aggregation should be
 easier to achieve, though still limited by the RAM memory. For

 ( 
decision taking, technologies like Artificial Neural Networks

)

and small Expert Systems could be implemented.


 

 
  


 







   
! VII. C ONCLUSIONS



  




  "

Figure 5. An example of a second generation system using Aes Sidhe motes.
from other motes, extending the context awareness of each
mote. Situations with this contextual information can be tagged
in each mote. For each situation, a mote can offer a service,
or execute an automatic action.
The user data cannot be directly acquired. It still needs input
from the user through a computer attached to a mote, or a
specialized device sensing user information.
This actions can be done with the current motes, as long as
data is managed in binary form, because RAM restrictions.
Another possibility would be using a Wireless Distributed
Computing (WDC) framework [14], enabling processing con-
text aggregation as data hops from mote to mote. An example
is presented in Fig.5.
C. Smartness
Smartness, being so complex, cannot be achieved by single
motes. Considering that this generation needs a big quantity
of data, a lot of motes would be needed. As they are not
as expensive as other devices, this would be an opportunity
for Aes Sidhe motes. If nodes were using distributed context
aggregation, the data processing capability would be a lot
bigger. Even with this processing power raise, Aes Sidhe
motes don’t have enough RAM memory to keep all data,
thus all semantic ontologies and data mining still needs heavy
processing in a data warehouse.
VI. E XPECTED R ESULTS AND F UTURE WORK
Aes Sidhe motes, can be well used in first generation
systems, with some delays in processing and the inability of
managing multimedia data. For being able to fetch informa-
tion from the user, a gateway with protocols used by other
commonly used devices needs to be made.
By using clever algorithms and binary representations of
data, tasks from the second generation can be done by the
motes. Extending it’s processing power to strengthen the con-
text aggregation by using a small WDC framework is possible
too. For the third generation, they can be used in helping with
data and context extraction helping data warehouses in having
pre-proccessed data.
With the addition of the DSP module under design, math
operations should be faster, and multimedia data could be
analyzed (though not transmitted). With this extra processing
346
When Aes Sidhe first development stage is finished, the
system is ready to be adapted for first generation systems,
though with poor user interaction. For second generation
systems, an application for context inferring, remote motes
data retrieval, and situations tagging can be made. The second
stage of development shall include the DSP and gateways to
WIFI and Bluetooth, for a good way of interacting with the
user through personal devices.
R EFERENCES
[1] J. Zheng and A. Jamalipour, Eds., Wireless Sensor Networks: A Net-
working Persepective. United States of America: Wiley, 2009.
[2] B. Warneke, K. S. J, and S. Dust, “Smart dust: Communicating with a
cubic-millimeter computer,” Classical Papers on Computational Logic,
vol. 1, pp. 372–383, 2001.
[3] W. Seah, Z. A. Eu, and H.-P. Tan, “Wireless sensor networks powered
by ambient energy harvesting (wsn-heap) - survey and challenges,” in
Wireless Communication, Vehicular Technology, Information Theory and
Aerospace Electronic Systems Technology, 2009. Wireless VITAE 2009.
1st International Conference on, may 2009, pp. 1 –5.
[4] W. Dargie and C. Poellabauer, Fundamentals of Wireless Sensor
Networks: Theory and Practice, ser. Wireless Communications and
Mobile Computing. John Wiley & Sons, 2010. [Online]. Available:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8c6k0EVr6rMC
[5] “Part 15,4: Wireless medium access control (mac) and physical layer
(phy) specifications for low-rate wireless personal area networks (lr-
wpans),” IEEE, Standard SH95127, Oct. 2003.
[6] “Zigbee specification,” Zigbee Alliance Inc., Specification 053474r17,
Jan. 2008.
[7] G. Montenegro, N. Kushalnagar, J. Hui, and D. Culler, “Transmission
of ipv6 packets over ieee 802.15.4 networks,” RFC 4944 (Proposed
Standard), IETF, RFC 4944, Sep. 2007.
[8] A. Ferscha, “20 years past weiser: What’s next?” Pervasive Computing,
IEEE, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 52 –61, jan. 2012.
[9] A. K. Dey, “Understanding and using context,” Personal Ubiquitous
Comput., vol. 5, pp. 4–7, January 2001. [Online]. Available:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s007790170019
[10] F. Gil-Castineira, E. Costa-Montenegro, F. Gonzalez-Castano, C. Lopez-
Bravo, T. Ojala, and R. Bose, “Experiences inside the ubiquitous oulu
smart city,” Computer, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 48 –55, june 2011.
[11] V. Velasco-Martínez, “Diseño de nodos y de una red inalámbrica de
sensores para mediciones agropecuarias,” Master Thesis, Instituto Tec-
nológico de la Laguna, Torreon, Mexico, Diciembre 2009, iSSN:0188-
8060 RIITEC:12-TMCIE-2009.
[12] M. FloresMedina, “Implementación de una red inalámbrica de sen-
sores en aplicaciones agropecuarias,” Master Thesis, Instituto Tec-
nológico de la Laguna, Torreoń, Coahuila, Febrero 2011, iSSN:0188-
8060 RIITEC:01-TMCIE-2011.
[13] “Pic18f2455/2550/4455/4550 datasheet - high-performance, enhanced
flash usb microcontrollers with nanowatt technology,” Microchip Tech-
nology Inc., Datasheet 39632E, 2009.
[14] D. Datla, X. Chen, T. Tsou, S. Raghunandan, S. Hasan, J. Reed,
C. Dietrich, T. Bose, B. Fette, and J.-H. Kim, “Wireless distributed
computing: a survey of research challenges,” Communications Magazine,
IEEE, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 144 –152, january 2012.