An Adaptive Amplifier System for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive amplifier that is part of a sensor node in a wireless sensor network. The system presents a target gain that has to be maintained without direct human intervention despite the presence of faults. In addition, its bandwidth must be as large as possible. The system is composed of a software-based built-in self-test scheme implemented in the node that checks all the available gains in the amplifiers, a reconfigurable amplifier, and a genetic algorithm (GA) for reconfiguring the node resources that runs on a host computer. We adopt a PSoC device from Cypress for the node implementation. The performance evaluation of the scheme presented is made by adopting four different types of fault models in the amplifier gains. The fault simulation results show that GA finds the target gain with low error, maintains the bandwidth above the minimum tolerable bandwidth, and presents a runtime lower than exhaustive search method.