Zero Power Energy-Aware Communication for Transiently-Powered Sensing Systems

Torrisi, Alessandro; Brunelli, Davide; Yıldırım, Kasım Sinan

doi:10.1145/3417308.3430269

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A new class of embedded devices that can sense, compute, and communicate without batteries emerged. As an example, RF-powered batteryless sensors [11,51] solely rely on the harvested energy of ambient radio frequency waves in the air (see Figure 1). These batteryless devices, which can feature even more complex sensors such as cameras [31], comprise ultra-low-power microcontrollers (e.g., MSP430FR5969 [49]) whose main architectural components, e.g., registers and main memory, are volatile.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

NORM: An FPGA-based Non-volatile Memory Emulation Framework for Intermittent Computing

Ruffini

Caronti

Yıldırım

et al. 2022

J. Emerg. Technol. Comput. Syst.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Today’s intermittent computing systems operate by relying only on harvested energy accumulated in their tiny energy reservoirs, typically capacitors. An intermittent device dies due to a power failure when there is no energy in its capacitor and boots again when the harvested energy is sufficient to power its hardware components. Power failures prevent the forward progress of computation due to the frequent loss of computational state. To remedy this problem, intermittent computing systems comprise built-in fast non-volatile memories with high write endurance to store information that persists despite frequent power failures. However, the lack of design tools makes fast-prototyping these systems difficult. Even though FPGAs are common platforms for fast prototyping and behavioral verification of continuously-powered architectures, they do not target prototyping intermittent computing systems. This article introduces a new FPGA-based framework, named NORM ( N on-volatile mem OR y e M ulator), to emulate and verify the behavior of any intermittent computing system that exploits fast non-volatile memories. Our evaluation showed that NORM can be used to emulate and validate FeRAM-based transiently-powered hardware architectures successfully.

show abstract

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

NORM: An FPGA-based Non-volatile Memory Emulation Framework for Intermittent Computing

Ruffini

Caronti

Yıldırım

et al. 2022

J. Emerg. Technol. Comput. Syst.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…First, we measure the RF bandwidth of the transceiver circuit in the form of fractional bandwidth (FBW). It is important to understand the sensitivity of the receiver concerning the carrier frequency, as different carriers can be used to transmit both the information on the energy status and the actual data [11]. We set the illuminator at different frequencies in a range between 858MHz and 898MHz Fig.…”

Section: A Characterization Of Auto-modulator and Backscattermentioning

confidence: 99%

Reliable Transiently-Powered Communication

Torrisi,

Yıldırım,

Brunelli

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

I. INTRODUCTIONB ATTERYLESS energy harvesting devices (e.g., [2], [3]) operate by relying upon several ambient sources such as solar [3], radiofrequency (RF) [4], [5] and even bacteria species [6]. These devices store the harvested energy in a small capacitor. They consume the stored energy conservatively to compute, sense, and communicate. When the capacitor drains out, these devices turn off due to a power failure. Therefore, the life-cycle of a batteryless device is composed of charge, sense/compute/send, and die intervals that repeat indefinitely.Wireless communication is an indispensable requirement for batteryless sensors. Radio transmission using active radios is costly compared to the energy budget of batteryless systems [1], [7]. RF backscatter avoids the energy-hungry circuits of active radios (e.g., power-hungry mixers generating carrier waves [8]), which brings almost zero-power wireless communication capabilities for batteryless nodes. In traditional RF backscatter, tags transmit by reflecting the impinging RF signals produced by a dedicated illuminator. This operation requires several orders of magnitude less energy than wireless tag transmission using active radios [1], [9].The ultra-low-power wireless communication capability introduced by the RF backscatter is not sufficient to enable reliable communication among transiently-powered batteryless nodes [10]. In particular, prior work assumed that devices are continuously powered even during zero-power communications, e.g., the RFID reader provides continuous energy. However, batteryless nodes operate intermittently, and communication is subject to power failures. Consider the scenario between two batteryless nodes depicted in Figure 1. Node A, which has a high energy level, wants to engage transmission with node B, which has a low energy level. In this example, the receiver node does not have enough energy to pursue the packet reception. Node B dies upon an unpredicted power failure, which leads to a packet delivery failure and wastes

show abstract

“…The main challenge we tackle is how to modulate the RF reflection to encode the energy state information avoiding power-hungry components and circuits. To this end, we present a novel circuit, named auto-modulator, that shares the energy status via modulating a burst signal based on an ultra-lowpower and low-frequency oscillator, without microcontroller intervention (as opposed to our previous circuit presented in [11]).…”

Section: Auto-modulating Energy Status Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We present TRAP (TRAnsiently-powered Protocol) [11] and its fundamental building blocks in this section. TRAP ensures reliable intermittent communication by sharing the energy status information of the nodes.…”

Section: Reliable Intermittent Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Reliable Transiently-Powered Communication

2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Frequent power failures can introduce significant packet losses during communication among energy harvesting batteryless wireless sensors. Nodes should be aware of the energy level of their neighbors to guarantee the success of communication and avoid wasting energy. This paper presents TRAP (TRAnsiently-powered Protocol) that allows nodes to communicate only if the energy availability on both sides of the communication channel is sufficient before packet transmission. TRAP relies on a novel modulator circuit, which operates without microcontroller intervention and transmits the energy status almost for free over the radiofrequency backscatter channel. Our experimental results showed that TRAP avoids failed transmissions introduced by the power failures and ensures reliable intermittent communication among batteryless sensors.

show abstract

Zero Power Energy-Aware Communication for Transiently-Powered Sensing Systems

Cited by 12 publications

References 30 publications

NORM: An FPGA-based Non-volatile Memory Emulation Framework for Intermittent Computing

NORM: An FPGA-based Non-volatile Memory Emulation Framework for Intermittent Computing

Reliable Transiently-Powered Communication

Reliable Transiently-Powered Communication

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About