Peripheral state persistence for transiently-powered systems

Berthou, Gautier; Delizy, Tristan; Marquet, Kevin; Risset, Tanguy; Salagnac, Guillaume

doi:10.1109/giots.2017.8016243

Cited by 23 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…RESTOP causes a time overhead of about 15% when configuring a peripheral. However, this represents a maximum overhead of 0.82% during complete execution of our typical sensing application and is substantially lower than the existing approach Sytare [9], which causes a time overhead of up to 137% (30

μ

s per peripheral instruction) when configuring a radio transceiver. Moreover, the time overhead caused by RESTOP will decrease further as the ratio of the peripheral instructions: normal operation decreases.…”

Section: Experimental Validationmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Berthou et al [9] proposed Sytare, a software approach which retains not only the system state but also the configuration of external peripherals attached to the MCU through SPI. This approach includes so-called kernel code, which operates between the main application and the library to access the external peripheral features (peripheral driver), and it is in charge of saving and restoring the peripheral state.…”

Section: Problem Statement and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the vast majority of sensing systems also include external sensors, actuators, radio transceivers, etc. A recent approach [9] attempted to save and restore the state of external peripherals; however, it only operates with peripherals that interact with the MCU through SPI. Moreover, this approach requires the user to make several adjustments depending on the type and number of peripherals connected (it is not generic) and causes a high time overhead.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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RESTOP: Retaining External Peripheral State in Intermittently-Powered Sensor Systems

Arreola

Balsamo

Merrett

et al. 2018

Sensors

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Energy harvesting sensor systems typically incorporate energy buffers (e.g., rechargeable batteries and supercapacitors) to accommodate fluctuations in supply. However, the presence of these elements limits the miniaturization of devices. In recent years, researchers have proposed a new paradigm, transient computing, where systems operate directly from the energy harvesting source and allow computation to span across power cycles, without adding energy buffers. Various transient computing approaches have addressed the challenge of power intermittency by retaining the processor’s state using non-volatile memory. However, no generic approach has yet been proposed to retain the state of peripherals external to the processing element. This paper proposes RESTOP, flexible middleware which retains the state of multiple external peripherals that are connected to a computing element (i.e., a microcontroller) through protocols such as SPI or I2C. RESTOP acts as an interface between the main application and the peripheral, which keeps a record, at run-time, of the transmitted data in order to restore peripheral configuration after a power interruption. RESTOP is practically implemented and validated using three digitally interfaced peripherals, successfully restoring their configuration after power interruptions, imposing a maximum time overhead of 15% when configuring a peripheral. However, this represents an overhead of only 0.82% during complete execution of our typical sensing application, which is substantially lower than existing approaches.

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μ

Section: Experimental Validationmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Problem Statement and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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RESTOP: Retaining External Peripheral State in Intermittently-Powered Sensor Systems

Arreola

Balsamo

Merrett

et al. 2018

Sensors

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“…DINO [Lucia and Ransford 2015], Chain and Alpaca [Maeng et al 2017] use tasks and buffer writes to ensure idempotent task re-execution, despite WAR dependences. RESTOP [Rodriguez Arreola et al 2018], Sytare [Berthou et al 2017], and Samoyed [Maeng and Lucia 2019] address retaining the state of peripheral devices. InK [Yildirim et al 2018] and Coati [Ruppel and Lucia 2019] address event driven programming in intermittent systems.…”

Section: Rfid Protocolmentioning

confidence: 99%

I/O dependent idempotence bugs in intermittent systems

Surbatovich

Jia

Lucia

2019

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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Intermittently-powered, energy-harvesting devices operate on energy collected from their environment and must operate intermittently as energy is available. Runtime systems for such devices often rely on checkpoints or redo-logs to save execution state between power cycles, causing arbitrary code regions to re-execute on reboot. Any non-idempotent program behaviorÐbehavior that can change on each executionÐcan lead to incorrect results. This work investigates non-idempotent behavior caused by repeating I/O operations, not addressed by prior work. If such operations affect a control statement or address of a memory update, they can cause programs to take different paths or write to different memory locations on re-executions, resulting in inconsistent memory states. We provide the first characterization of input-dependent idempotence bugs and develop IBIS-S, a program analysis tool for detecting such bugs at compile time, and IBIS-D, a dynamic information flow tracker to detect bugs at runtime. These tools use taint propagation to determine the reach of input. IBIS-S searches for code patterns leading to inconsistent memory updates, while IBIS-D detects concrete memory inconsistencies. We evaluate IBIS on embedded system drivers and applications. IBIS can detect I/O-dependent idempotence bugs, giving few (IBIS-S) or no (IBIS-D) false positives and providing actionable bug reports. These bugs are common in sensor-driven applications and are not fixed by existing intermittent systems.

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“…1). Another approach called Sytare [2] is able to retain the system state and the configuration of SPI peripherals. However, this approach requires the user to write not only the structure where the functions to configure the peripheral are encapsulated and saved, but also the function to restore the peripheral state after a supply interruption.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Generic Middleware for External Peripheral State Retention in Transiently-Powered Sensor Systems

Arreola

Balsamo

Merrett

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems

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Sensor systems powered by energy harvesting usually include batteries or supercapacitors which impact the system cost and size, need time to be charged and are not environmentally friendly. In recent years, designers have proposed a new concept called transient computing that aims to remove these energy storage units and retain the system's state between power outages, in order to cope with an unreliable energy source. However, existing approaches cannot retain the state of external peripherals or are specific to certain peripherals, i.e. they are not generic. This poster proposes a generic middleware, capable to retain the state of external peripherals that are connected to a microcontroller through SPI. The validation shows the proposed approach retains the peripheral configuration between power failures with a maximum time overhead of 15% when configuring the peripheral. However, this represents a 0.77% overhead for a complete example application, which is lower than that caused by existing approaches.

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Peripheral state persistence for transiently-powered systems

Cited by 23 publications

References 13 publications

RESTOP: Retaining External Peripheral State in Intermittently-Powered Sensor Systems

RESTOP: Retaining External Peripheral State in Intermittently-Powered Sensor Systems

I/O dependent idempotence bugs in intermittent systems

A Generic Middleware for External Peripheral State Retention in Transiently-Powered Sensor Systems

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