The Elastic Node: An Experimentation Platform for Hardware Accelerator Research in the Internet of Things

While adaptive hardware acceleration shows huge potential for autonomic IoT applications, developing and experimenting with accelerators in embedded environments is still very challenging. For this reason we developed a novel experimentation platform, the Elastic Node Platform, which we present in this paper. It consists of a wireless embedded device with an 8-bit micro-controller and a low-energy embedded FPGA in combination with a minimal abstraction middleware. The main goal of our platform is to empower researchers and software developers without hardware design knowledge to experiment with adaptive hardware acceleration. We explain our design, show how to use it for developing experiments and evaluate its performance.