An Opportunistic Reconfiguration Strategy for Environmentally Powered Devices

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 increas- ing need for exibility and recon gurability of such devices makes its energy management even more challenging. As a result, to e ciently exploit the potentially unlimited envi- ronmental energy, new adaptation strategies are required. In this paper we present a novel system recon guration strat- egy that exploits the intrinsic unpredictability of environ- mental energy to opportunistically recon gure the device. To assess the e ectiveness of the proposed recon guration strategy we rst perform a theoretical evaluation using sta- tistical energy pro le distribution and then we evaluate its energy e ciency on a prototype device in the presence of bursty energy pro les that we emulate using a programmable energy source

ABSTRACT An Opportunistic Reconfiguration Strategy for Environmentally Powered Devices

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. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.3 [Special-purpose and application-based systems]: Real-time and embedded systems General Terms experimentatio