## 1 Introduction  
Internet of Things (IoT) short-range, ultra-low power communication technologies comprise one of the most rapidly evolving research areas attracting significant interest both from academia and the industry [1]. Consequently, respective communication protocols as well as platforms have emerged as prominent infrastructure upon which future Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) can be based. A major factor for this growth can be attributed to the novel communication paradigm, through which relative communication approaches have been introduced enabling flexible communication, distributed operation and rapid deployment without the need for any pre-existing infrastructure, mobility support, low-power functionality and many more critical features. Additionally, IoT and CPS have significantly benefited from the advancements in hardware and Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design leading to very low cost, complexity, size and, most importantly, power consumption embedded systems able to be used as a suitable hardware infrastructure [2; 3; 4]. Furthermore, another aspect related to hardware design, concerns the anticipated advantages yielded by the hardware accelerators. The latter, comprise highly specialized hardware components integrated on general-purpose IoT platforms, dedicated to perform highly complex operations in the most efficient way. Such approach offersmultifaceted benefits since the design of nodes can exhibit significantly higher degree of dynamicity and modularity, tailored to specific applications. At the same time, demanding operations are performed with maximum efficiency, while the main processing unit of the nodes is not overwhelmed. A consequence of the aforementioned benefits is that the relative application domain has significantly expanded from simple data processing and transmission scenarios to increasingly demanding ones. Respective examples entail significant processing workload (e.g., medical applications), the support of complex communication standards (e.g., IPv6 routing protocol support enabling true IoT deployment), and the cooperative functionality among nodes in order to achieve a common goal etc. Of course, aspects such as time-constrained communication and power aware operation impose stringent requirements. In order to meet the respective requirements, researchers must surpass the challenge of the extremely limited resource availability encountered in all nowadays Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) platforms. The respective limitation ranges from low processing power offered by typical low-end micro-controller units, to limited communication bandwidth offered by protocols like IEEE 802.15.4 or Bluetooth, as well as scarce availability in terms of memory (few tens of Kbytes) and energy. Concerning the latter limitation (i.e., energy availability), emphasis must be put on the fact that the wireless radio interface comprises the main power consumption factor, which highlights the respective deficiencies. Therefore, a common critical objective in various pragmatic approaches, aiming towards lifetime extension, is the deactivation of the relative hardware when respective functionality is not required for extended periods of time [5; 6]. In this paper, the authors tackle the aforementioned deficiencies stemming from scarce bandwidth and energy availability, which in conjunction with demanding applications comprise a notorious challenge. As it will be analyzed in the following section, real-time analysis of biomedical modalities requires excessive volume of data transmission, forming two challenging side effects. On one hand, it is easily quantifiable that in many cases the bandwidth offered cannot handle the required data rate. On the other hand, even in cases where the channel capacity is adequate for data creation rates, the respective scenarios lead to continuous operation of highly power consuming components, and especially the wireless radio interface.