There are certain specific and very important, for numerous application domains, features of WSNs such as high-security levels, low power consumption, video-capabilities, auto-configuration and self-organization, that are not efficiently addressed by today’s offerings; SMART aims at providing an infrastructure that will support all those features efficiently and inexpensively. This innovative infrastructure will be based on both an off-the-shelf reconfigurable device and on a specially designed and implemented Reconfigurable Application-Specific Instruction-set Processor (RASIP). Even though, the reconfigurable hardware resources are often considered, for certain processing tasks, more power hungry than the ultra-low-power microcontrollers, it has been proved that they allow for extremely more performant and power-efficient processing when implementing encryption/decryption/authentication algorithms as well as data/video/image compression tasks. The SMART system will also take advantage of the partial real-time reconfiguration feature of the reconfigurable devices and will be able to alter their processing tasks according to the environment the sensor network operates in.

In order to achieve its aims SMART will design, develop and implement:

• a sophisticated WSN node, based on a low-power miniaturized Reconfigurable Device;
• a new reconfigurable processing unit that has built-in real-time reconfigurable technology and a very low power CPU for power efficient processing in WSN environments;
• the middleware for the seamless programming, configuration and management of the SMART infrastructure;
• innovative encryption and authentication schemes, data compression algorithms and video compression schemes addressing the WSNs’ requirements;
• a mechanism for sensing the environment and re-configuring the Reconfigurable Devices in real-time;
• secure nodes providing high resistance to side-channel attacks;
• a large real-world trial consisting of sensors and cameras.