Hardware support for packet handling, data buffering, burst transmissions, data encryption, data authentication, clear channel assessment, link quality indication and packet timing information
A co-processing board can be added to the motherboard on P1, P2 connectors. This board provides dynamic voltage scaling and hardware acceleration to increase the energy efficiency of the network.
PowWow uses RICER[3] protocol proposed by UC Berkeley to reduce the time spent in radio reception (RX) mode. This protocol consists in cycled rendez-vous initiated by a wake-up beacon from potential receivers. Thanks to this method, nodes are sleeping most of the time, hence saving energy.
PowWow software distribution provides an API organized into protocol layers (PHY, MAC, LINK, NET and APP). The software is based on the protothread library of Contiki, which provides a sequential control flow without complex state machines or full multi-threading.
The first version of PowWow were released July 2009. PowWow V1 includes the motherboard, the radio board and the software. A first prototype of the coprocessing board is currently available but not yet distributed. PowWow V2 is under development.
PowWow is delivered as an open-source hardware and open source software under the GPL license.
^O. Berder and O. Sentieys. Powwow : Power optimized hardware/software framework for wireless motes. In Proc. of the Workshop on Ultra-Low Power Sensor Networks (WUPS), co-located with Int. Conf. on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS 2010), pages 229–233, Hannover, Germany, February 2010.
^Lin, E.-Y. A., Rabaey, J. M., Wolisz, A. : Power-efficient rendez-vous schemes for dense wireless sensor networks. In Proc. of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Communications, Paris, France, June 2004.
^M.M. Alam, O. Berder, D. Menard, T. Anger, and O. Sentieys. A hybrid model for accurate energy analysis of wsn nodes. EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems, 2011.
