Title
Improving the Forward Progress of Transient Systems
Abstract
Emerging applications for Internet of Things (IoT) devices demand smaller mass, size, and cost whilst increasing capability and reliability. Energy harvesting can provide power to these ultra-constrained devices, but introduces unreliability, unpredictability, and intermittency. Schemes for wireless sensors without batteries or supercapacitors overcome intermittency through saving system state into nonvolatile memory before the supply drops below the minimum operating voltage, termed transient, or intermittent computing. However, this introduces significant time and energy overheads. This article presents two schemes that significantly reduce these overheads: entering a sleep mode to avoid saving state and utilizing direct memory access (DMA) when state saves are required. Time and energy previously wasted on state saves can instead be used to perform useful computation, termed “forward progress.” We practically validate the proposed approaches across a range of energy sources and IoT benchmarks and demonstrate up to 46.8% and 40.3% increase in forward progress and up to 91.1% and 85.6% reduction in overheads for each scheme, respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TCAD.2020.2999913
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Embedded systems,energy harvesting (EH),low-power design,transient computing,intermittent computing
Journal
40
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
0278-0070
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tim Daulby100.34
Anand Savanth2265.73
geoffrey merrett341149.30
Alex S. Weddell422525.00