Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks platforms have not evolved as expected during the past decade. The monolithic principles of the first nodes are still followed in the new designs. The architectures are not prepared to include upgrades such as new energy management modules or even more energy efficient communication units. This leads to constraints on the development of new protocols and applications, since the software takes the entire burden on the reconfigurability and optimization that could be done by a modular architecture. In this work, we propose a new platform - MoteIST - with a different architecture, introducing higher modularity and addressing the energy management issues, while maintaining the compatibility with previously designed software and sensing boards. Our design enables different energy management solutions, including harvesting modules and different communication units, such as wake-up, sub-1 GHz and 2.4 GHz radios. We describe the implementation and analyze the relevant characteristics of MoteIST, namely its memory footprint and power profile.

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