An opportunistic reconfiguration strategy for environmentally powered devices

ABSTRACT

Environmental energy is becoming a feasible alternative to traditional energy sources for ultra low-power devices such as sensor nodes and smart watches. Moreover, the increasing need for flexibility and reconfigurability of such devices makes its energy management even more challenging. As a result, to efficiently exploit the potentially unlimited environmental energy, new adaptation strategies are required. In this paper we present a novel system reconfiguration strategy that exploits the intrinsic unpredictability of environmental energy to opportunistically reconfigure the device. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed reconfiguration strategy we first perform a theoretical evaluation using statistical energy profile distribution and then we evaluate its energy efficiency on a prototype device in the presence of bursty energy profiles that we emulated using a programmable energy source.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Real-time and embedded systems

General Terms:
Experimentation

Keywords:
reconfiguration, scavenging, sensor network