Abstract
Serial peripheral interface (SPI) has been identified as a bottleneck in many wireless sensing systems today. SPI is used almost universally as the physical connection between the microcontroller unit (MCU) and radios, storage devices, and many types of sensors. Virtually all wireless sensor nodes today perform up to twice as many bus transactions as necessary to transfer a given piece of data, as an MCU must serve as the bus master in all transactions. To eliminate this bottleneck, we propose the master-handoff protocol. After the MCU initiates reading from the source slave device and writing to the sink slave device, the MCU as a master becomes a slave, and either the source or the sink slave becomes the temporary master. Experiment results show that this master-handoff technique not only cuts the data transfer time in half, but, more importantly, also enables a superlinear energy reduction. © 2012 ETRI.