Battery-free sensing devices harvest energy from their surrounding environment to perform sensing, computation, and communication. A core challenge for these devices is maintaining usefulness despite erratic, random, or irregular energy availability, which causes inconsistent execution, loss of service, and power failures. Adapting execution (degrading or upgrading) based on available or predicted power/energy seems promising to stave off power failures, meet deadlines, or increase throughput. However, due to constrained resources and limited local information, deciding what and when exactly to adapt is challenging. This article explores the fundamentals of energy-aware adaptation for intermittently powered computers and proposes heuristic adaptation mechanisms to dynamically modulate the program complexity at run-time to enable higher sensor coverage and throughput. While we target battery-free, intermittently powered, resource-constrained sensors, we see a general application to all energy harvesting devices.
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REHASH: A Flexible, Developer Focused, Heuristic Adaptation Platform for Intermittently Powered Computing
Battery-free sensing devices harvest energy from their surrounding environment to perform sensing, computation, and communication. This enables previously impossible applications in the Internet-of-Things. A core challenge for these devices is maintaining usefulness despite erratic, random or irregular energy availability; which causes inconsistent execution, loss of service and power failures. Adapting execution (degrading or upgrading) seems promising as a way to stave off power failures, meet deadlines, or increase throughput. However, because of constrained resources and limited local information, it is a challenge to decide when would be the best time to adapt, and how exactly to adapt execution. In this paper, we systematically explore the fundamental mechanisms of energy-aware adaptation, and propose heuristic adaptation as a method for modulating the performance of tasks to enable higher sensor coverage, completion rates, or throughput, depending on the application. We build a task based adaptive runtime system for intermittently powered sensors embodying this concept. We complement this runtime with a user facing simulator that enables programmers to conceptualize the tradeoffs they make when choosing what tasks to adapt, and how, relative to real world energy harvesting environment traces. While we target battery-free, intermittently powered sensors, we see general application to all energy harvesting devices. We explore heuristic adaptation with varied energy harvesting modalities and diverse applications: machine learning, activity recognition, and greenhouse monitoring, and find that the adaptive version of our ML app performs up to 46% more classifications with only a 5% drop in accuracy; the activity recognition app captures 76% more classifications with only nominal down-sampling; and find that heuristic adaptation leads to higher throughput versus non-adaptive in all cases.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1850496
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10314337
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2474-9567
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3478077
