Towards a Low Power Virtual Machine for Wireless Sensor Network motes

Virtual Machines (VMs) have been proposed as an efficient programming model for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices. However, the processing overhead required for VM execution has a significant impact on the power consumption and battery lifetime of these devices. This paper analyses the sources of power consumption in the Mate VM for WSNs. The paper proposes a generalised processor architecture allowing for hardware acceleration of VM execution. The paper proposes a number of hardware accelerators for Mate VMexecution and assesses their effectiveness.