Paper Info
Title
Tragedy of the Coulombs: Federating Energy Storage for Tiny, Intermittently-Powered Sensors
Abstract
Untethered sensing devices have, for decades, powered all system components (processors, sensors, actuators, etc) from a single shared energy store (battery or capacitor). When designing batteryless sensors that are powered by harvested energy, this traditional approach results in devices that charge slowly and that are more error prone, inflexible, and inefficient than they could be. This paper presents a novel federated approach to energy storage, called UFoP, that partitions and prioritizes harvested energy automatically into multiple isolated smaller energy stores (capacitors). UFoP simplifies task scheduling, enables efficient use of components with differing voltage requirements, and produces devices that charge more quickly under identical harvesting conditions than a traditional centralized approach. We have implemented a UFoP reference design and conducted extensive experimental evaluation, including a short deployment. Our experimental results using an MSP430-based prototype show that UFoP provides as much as 10% more computational availability, and as much as four times more radio availability than the centralized approach. For all applications and energy environments evaluated, UFoP harvested 0.7-10.2% more energy than the centralized equivalent; meaning UFoP adds zero energy overhead.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2809695.2809707
Conference On Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Energy Harvesting,Federated Energy,Task Coupling,Capacitor,Embedded System
Energy storage,Capacitor,Computer science,Scheduling (computing),Voltage,Energy harvesting,Real-time computing,Battery (electricity),Reference design,Embedded system,Actuator
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
20
0.81
23
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Josiah D. Hester113818.13
Lanny Sitanayah21009.10
Jacob Sorber3403.88