{"title":"A Battery-Free Long-Range Wireless Smart Camera for Face Detection","authors":"Marco Giordano, Philipp Mayer, M. Magno","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430273","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a battery-free smart camera that combines tiny machine learning, long-range communication, power management, and energy harvesting. The smart sensor node has been implemented and evaluated in the field, showing both battery-less capabilities with a small-size photovoltaic panel and the energy efficiency of the proposed solution. We evaluated two different ARM Cortex-M4F microcontrollers, the Ambiq Apollo 3 that is an energy-efficient microcontroller, and a Microchip SAMD51 able to work in high radiation environments but with a higher power in active mode. Finally, a low power LoRa module provides the long-range wireless transmission capability. The tiny machine learning algorithm for face recognition has been optimized in terms of accuracy versus energy, achieving up to 97% accuracy recognizing five different faces. Experimental results demonstrated the capability of the developed sensor node to start from the cold start after 1 minute at a very low luminosity of 350 lux using a cm size flexible photovoltaic panels and work perpetually after the cold start.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125087806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Analysing and Improving Robustness of Predictive Energy Harvesting Systems","authors":"Naomi Stricker, L. Thiele","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430264","url":null,"abstract":"Internet of Things (IoT) systems can rely on energy harvesting to extend battery lifetimes or even to render batteries obsolete. Such systems employ an energy scheduler to optimize their behavior and thus performance by adapting the node operation. Predictive models of harvesting sources, which are inherently non-deterministic and consequently challenging to predict, are often necessary for the scheduler to optimize performance. Therefore the accuracy of the predictive model inevitably impacts the scheduler and system performance. This fact has been largely overlooked in the vast amount of available results on energy management systems. We define a novel robustness metric for energy-harvesting systems that describes the effect prediction errors have on the system performance. Furthermore, we show that if a scheduler is optimal when predictions are accurate, it is not very robust. Thus there is a tradeoff between robustness and performance. We propose a prediction scaling method to improve a system's robustness and demonstrate the results using energy harvesting data sets from both outdoor and indoor scenarios. The method improves a non-robust system's performance by up to 75 times in a real-world setting.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124059872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. C. B. Wong, Sivert T. Sliper, William Wang, A. Weddell, S. Gauthier, G. Merrett
{"title":"Energy-aware HW/SW Co-modeling of Batteryless Wireless Sensor Nodes","authors":"S. C. B. Wong, Sivert T. Sliper, William Wang, A. Weddell, S. Gauthier, G. Merrett","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430272","url":null,"abstract":"Energy harvesting wireless sensor nodes are sensitive to spatial and temporal fluctuations in energy availability. This issue is especially prevalent in batteryless systems, where devices are directly connected to power sources with little or no buffering. The strong coupling of energy supply and demand introduces a new dimension to the problem of designing robust networked sensing systems. We propose a modeling framework for this class of batteryless systems with an emphasis on the interactions between energy and function. The tool models energy harvesters, power management circuitry, energy storage, microcontrollers, sensors, radio modules, environmental models, and is fully extensible. The microcontroller model is based on cycle-accurate instruction set simulators from Fused, with various peripheral extensions to enable board-level functionality, such as SPI, DMA, hardware multiplier etc. The tool enables virtual prototyping of self-powered wireless sensor nodes, but is especially useful for studying intermittent operation and developing application specific software, hardware, or combined solutions. The simulator is capable of executing real workloads under realistic conditions and this is demonstrated through a case study where the same compiled binary is executed on a virtual prototype and its corresponding physical wireless sensor system to yield matching digital traces and current profiles","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124812211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Zero Power Energy-Aware Communication for Transiently-Powered Sensing Systems","authors":"A. Torrisi, D. Brunelli, K. Yıldırım","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430269","url":null,"abstract":"Battery-less wireless sensors powered directly by miniaturized energy harvesters can be appealing only if communication between nodes is realized without wasting energy. In devices that implement intermittent computing, efficient communications remain an open challenge. Transmitters should be aware of unavailable receivers to prevent packet losses due to power failures. Backscatter transmissions can be used to propagate the energy state almost for free in the surrounding. This paper presents a backscatter radio mechanism and a protocol that regulates the communication between nodes, guaranteeing packet transmissions only if sufficient energy is stored in the transmitter and the receiver. Simulation results demonstrate our approach's effectiveness and show the performance of this new type of intermittent communication.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121870737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adaptive Energy Budgeting for Atomic Operations in Intermittently-Powered Systems","authors":"J. Zhan, A. Weddell, G. Merrett","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430277","url":null,"abstract":"Intermittently-powered energy-harvesting systems offer the potential to form a long-lasting and environmentally friendly Internet of Things. Atomic operations in such systems refer to those that should be executed without interruption, e.g. wireless transmission; if interrupted by power loss, they must restart rather than resume from the interrupted point. State-of-the-art approaches handle atomic operations by either taking a checkpoint before the operation, or ensuring sufficient energy is buffered through design-time profiling of the required energy. Such approaches become inefficient or fail if energy consumption or storage changes, e.g. due to aging or environmental factors. This paper proposes a method for online profiling of energy budgets for atomic operations, enabling intermittent systems to adapt to changes in environment or system conditions. We show that an existing approach fails if capacitance drops by 66%, whereas our approach successfully adapts to changes and ensures atomicity as long as the required energy can be stored.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132564790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Energy Harvesting Systems Need an Operating System Too","authors":"S. Venkat, Marshall Clyburn, Bradford Campbell","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430274","url":null,"abstract":"Software support for intermittent devices has emerged as a key area of research in resource-constrained computing. Work in this area aims to ease application development by providing support for making forward progress in the face of frequent power outages. Typically, systems in prior work provide a runtime or a kernel as the system abstraction and are customized for a small set of hardware. In this paper, we propose our vision for the future of intermittent computing and explore extending a general-purpose embedded operating system to handle intermittent workloads. We show how many common OS abstractions benefit the highly constrained intermittent domain and describe the design extensions required to support intermittent devices. We evaluate the system with respect to memory, time, and developer overhead and argue that full OS support is a promising direction for future intermittent systems.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122375686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
H. Asad, E. Wouters, Naveed Anwar Bhatti, L. Mottola, T. Voigt
{"title":"On Securing Persistent State in Intermittent Computing","authors":"H. Asad, E. Wouters, Naveed Anwar Bhatti, L. Mottola, T. Voigt","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430267","url":null,"abstract":"We present the experimental evaluation of different security mechanisms applied to persistent state in intermittent computing. Whenever executions become intermittent because of energy scarcity, systems employ persistent state on non-volatile memories (NVMs) to ensure forward progress of applications. Persistent state spans operating system and network stack, as well as applications. While a device is off recharging energy buffers, persistent state on NVMs may be subject to security threats such as stealing sensitive information or tampering with configuration data, which may ultimately corrupt the device state and render the system unusable. Based on modern platforms of the Cortex M* series, we experimentally investigate the impact on typical intermittent computing workloads of different means to protect persistent state, including software and hardware implementations of staple encryption algorithms and the use of ARM TrustZone protection mechanisms. Our results indicate that i) software implementations bear a significant overhead in energy and time, sometimes harming forward progress, but also retaining the advantage of modularity and easier updates; ii) hardware implementations offer much lower overhead compared to their software counterparts, but require a deeper understanding of their internals to gauge their applicability in given application scenarios; and iii) TrustZone shows almost negligible overhead, yet it requires a different memory management and is only effective as long as attackers cannot directly access the NVMs.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"54 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123342382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Arwa Alsubhi, Nicole Tobias, Simeon Babatunde, Jacob M. Sorber
{"title":"Can Crystal Oscillators Keep Time Without Power?","authors":"Arwa Alsubhi, Nicole Tobias, Simeon Babatunde, Jacob M. Sorber","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430278","url":null,"abstract":"Accurate timekeeping is a critical challenge for many intermittently-powered computing devices. Current approaches to keeping time across power failures provide either limited resolution or require additional hardware. We would like to introduce one more. Many devices already use a crystal oscillator for accurate timing when powered. In this poster, we explore whether we can use the off-the-shelf oscillators we're already using to keep time even when we don't have power. We present early-stage experimental results, using the oscillator's stabilization time to approximate power outage times. We will also discuss the strengths, weaknesses, likely applications, and future directions of this work.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132398202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Estimating Harvestable Energy in Time-Varying Indoor Light Conditions","authors":"Xinyv Ma, S. Bader, B. Oelmann","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430270","url":null,"abstract":"Ambient light energy harvesting is a cost-effective and mature approach for supplying low-power sensor systems with power in many indoor applications. Although the spectral information of a light source is known to influence the efficiency and output power of a photovoltaic cell, the spectrum of the ambient illumination is due to measurement complexity often neglected when characterizing light conditions for power estimation purposes. In this paper we evaluate the influence of considering spectral information on the energy estimation accuracy. We create a dataset of varying light conditions in a typical indoor environment based on eight locations. For each location, we compare the energy estimation accuracy with and without spectral considerations. The results of this investigation demonstrate that a spectrum-based method leads to significant performance improvements in cases where the light condition is not defined by a single light source.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122199344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intermittence Anomalies not Considered Harmful","authors":"A. Maioli, L. Mottola","doi":"10.1145/3417308.3430266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3417308.3430266","url":null,"abstract":"We consider a new perspective on intermittence anomalies arising in intermittently-computing mixed-volatile systems. Existing forward progress techniques avoid such anomalies by enforcing a computation that corresponds to a continuous one, introducing a significant overhead. We take a different stand: by allowing the presence of specific anomalies, we make the program aware of intermittence, unlocking new design patterns. We argue about the various possibilities emerging from this and we make the concept concrete by applying it to loops. We show how intermittence anomalies allow to preserve the results of loop iterations across power failures, without requiring to save the device's volatile state after each iteration. Compared to existing checkpoint mechanisms, our technique shows on average a 35.2x lower energy consumption and a 48.4x lower execution time across several staple benchmarks.","PeriodicalId":386523,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems","volume":"2018 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128616279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}