NetSE: Medium: Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs)

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This research will design and implement energy-harvesting active networked tags (EnHANTs): small devices that can be attached to arbitrary objects that are traditionally not networked, such as books, furniture, walls, doors, toys, keys, produce, and clothing. EnHANTs harvest energy, network in a delay-tolerant fashion, and adapt their communications and networking mechanisms to satisfy their existing energy constraints. The tags will be thin, mechanically flexible, and small - a few square cm at most. EnHANTs are a disruptive and transformational technology that enables novel object tracking applications which are unavailable with conventional technologies, such as lost item recovery, disaster recovery, emergency alerts, and spatio-temporal proximity information. EnHANTs require a super-energy efficient architecture and design to operate effectively using only energy accumulated via harvesting. Such severe energy restrictions impose ultra-low power requirements that are much lower than traditional standards such as Bluetooth and Zigbee. Meeting these requirements gives EnHANTs the capability to remain functional in environments that are significantly more energy constrained. Given the severe energy constraints, a total rethinking of how to perform the energy harvesting and storage, communications, and networking is needed. The PIs take a comprehensive cross-layer design approach that combines expertise in networking, communications, low-power electronics, and organic energy-harvesting devices to make the efficiency improvements of several orders of magnitude that make EnHANTs possible. A test platform of networked tags will be deployed and tested demonstrating the energy harvesting, communication, and networking components developed using custom hardware. The research leads to new applications and services based on the low power, energy harvesting tags, that society can benefit from in a significant way.