wilamowski-b-m-irwin-j-d-industrial-communication-systems-2011

10-2 Industrial Communication Systems
Communication
protocols
Hardware
Harmonized
design
Application
design
Topology
FIGURE 10.1
Aspects of ultralow-power wireless communication design.
introduced that utilize energy sources efficiently. The final section looks at application design concepts
for ultralow-power wireless communication.
10.2 Hardware Approaches
10.2.1 Overview
Figure 10.2 shows the common architecture of an ultralow-power node. It consists of four basic parts
plus two optional parts. The basic parts, namely communication, processing, sensor and actuation, as
well as energy storage, are known from the introduction of energy-efficient WSN in Chapter 6.
For ultralow-power applications, the energy consumption of each component has to be minimized
to provide only the core functionality necessary. This may require developing customized hardware.
A new addition to this basic design for ultralow-power wireless nodes is the energy supply, which
allows recharging the energy storage with energy-harvesting approaches from the node environment.
Basic energy-harvesting approaches will be compared in the next section.
Ultralow energy consumption is reached by the option to deactivate individual hardware parts or
whole nodes. This is scheduled by the energy management that is usually running on the microcontroller
or separately on a low-power circuit depending on the power consumption of the microcontroller
and the computing requirements of the task. For instance, the aforementioned example
of acoustic structural health monitoring for airplanes is a task with high computation demands that
requires a dedicated digital signal processor (DSP) during measurements. Separating the energy
Transceiver
Processor
Sensors, actuators
Volatile/nonvolatile
memory
Sensors and
actuators
Processing
layer
Radio
Controller
ADC and DAC
DC/DC
Energy
management
Energy mgmt.
Energy storage
(battery)
Energy storage
Energy
harvesting
Energy supply
Energy
supply
layer
FIGURE 10.2
Common architecture of ultralow-power nodes.
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC