We introduce a distributed sensor architecture which enables high-performance 32-bit Linux capabilities to be embedded in a sensor which operates at the average power overhead of a small microcontroller. Adapting Linux to this architecture places increased emphasis on the performance of the Linux power-up/shutdown and suspend/resume cycles.
Our reference hardware implementation is described in detail. An acoustic beamforming application demonstrates a 4X power improvement over a centralized architecture.
Presented at the 2003 Ottawa Linux Symposium in July, 2003.