Marmote is a National Science Foundation supported collaborative research project between Vanderbilt University and the University of Michigan. The goal of the project is to create a novel low-power experimental platform for wireless networking research and education.
The proposed Marmote platform breaks with the prevailing approach to wireless sensor network (WSN) hardware, which combines a general purpose microcontroller with a highly integrated radio transceiver, and places a flash-based Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) along with a flexible Analog Front-End (AFE) in the center to become:
- low-power
- powerful
- flexible
- modular
The above approach allows for interfacing and experimenting with different type of sensors including analog radio front-ends. In contrast with the "traditional" integrated radio chip solution this enables access to the physical layer and, hence, to baseband firmware development.