Modeling and optimization for self-powered non-volatile IoT edge devices with ultra-low harvesting power

Abstract

Energy harvesters are becoming increasingly popular as power sources for IoT edge devices. However, one of the intrinsic problems of energy harvester is that harvesting power is often weak and frequently interrupted. Therefore, energy harvesting powered edge devices have to work intermittently. To maintain execution progress, execution states need to be checkpointed into the non-volatile memory before each power failure. In this way, previous execution states can be resumed after power comes back again. Nevertheless, frequent checkpointing and low charging efficiency generate significant energy overhead. To alleviate these problems, this article conducts a thorough energy efficiency analysis and proposes three algorithms to maximize the energy efficiency of program execution. First, a non-volatile processor-aware task scheduling algorithm is proposed to reduce the size of checkpointing data. Second, a tentative checkpointing avoidance technique is proposed to avoid checkpointing for further reduction of checkpointing overhead. Finally, a dynamic wake-up strategy is proposed to wake up the edge device at proper voltages where the total hardware and software overhead is minimized for further energy efficiency maximization. The experiments on a real testbed demonstrate that, with the proposed algorithms, an edge device is resilient to the extremely weak and intermittent power supply and the energy efficiency can be achieved more than 2× higher than the fundamental baseline and 1.5× higher than the state-of-the-art technique.