Ph.D. Forum Abstract: Back to the Future - Sustainable Transiently Powered Embedded Systems

We aim at developing software techniques which enables 32-bit transiently powered embedded systems to make progress across periods of energy unavailability without resorting to hardware modifications. Recently, we have seen a huge surge in wearable and smartbuilding centric sensing applications. However, these devices are integrated with batteries for charging which not only increases size and mass but also cost of the system. Powering the system directly from the energy harvesting source can mitigate this problem, but requires system software support to handle computations across power cycles, a paradigm known as transiently powered computing. We have designed portable system techniques to enable checkpointing of the program state on stable storage, along with its later recovery, with minimal latency and energy consumption. Right now, we are investigating how to determine where and when to perform checkpointing, and what support do we need to offer to developers to manage developing applications that may be interrupted for a non-negligible amount of time and later resume.