Reconfigurable Adaptive Wireless Sensor Node

This thesis describes the design and development of a new wireless sensor node technology called the Reconfigurable Adaptive Wireless Sensor (RAWS) Node. The RAWS node technology has the ability to adaptively support different analogue sensors by reconfiguring its hardware resources in an autonomic, flexible and scalable way. The research employs programmable mixed-signal hardware as the enabling technology and utilises the hardware reconfigurability as the foundation for implementing the research concepts. A sensor identification scheme has been developed which enables the RAWS node to identify a large number of sensors and acquire the key parameters and attributes of the connected sensor. The research has also developed three adaptive reconfiguration techniques which combine the sensor parameter and attribute information with the dynamic reconfigurability to autonomically adapt the mixed-signal hardware in real-time to different analogue sensors. These features are realised while keeping the power consumption of the system at a low level.