NeTS: Small: Designing Sustainable Battery-Free Multi-Hop Sensing Networks

Illinois Institute Of Technology, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The promise of pervasive, long-term, and large scale sensing has spurred many new applications. In spite of more than a decade of research, the promise of many such applications is still hindered by the limitation of power supply to devices. To provide a competitive sustainable solution for building these applications, this project takes a radical shift in the sensing and networking paradigm. It proposes to build battery-free sensing network (BFSN) by exploiting the ambient energy to support its operation. By removing the need for battery, it will support a sustainable operation, especially in hazard conditions. The underlying novelty is the establishment of a hybrid architecture (composed of three layers: battery-free devices, battery-powered devices, and base-stations) to enable the battery-free multi-hop networking with the low-power supply, extremely limited computation and storage in battery-free devices. The proposed research has the potential to revolutionize the communication architecture for sensor and cyber-physical systems, lowering their cost and easing their management. Many key challenges in realizing the benefits of BFSN will focus on the small-sized battery-free devices, such as charging these devices, placement of devices and charging stations, networking these devices and the wider network, and locating them. First, the researchers study Smart Energy Harvesting and Charging. They propose to carefully deploy and schedule the wireless charging stations to compensate the unstable and unreliable environmental energy, and provide sustainable network services. Secondly, the researchers study Battery-free Networking and Communication. To enable networking of multiple devices, they present a complete network stack, composed of the physical layer protocols, the link layer protocols, and network layer protocols. Data collection protocols are proposed for trade-offs among latency, energy-efficiency, and network reliability. Thirdly, the researchers study Battery-free Locating and Tracking. They aim to divide battery-free devices into different categories and propose different algorithms to locate them with good accuracy while successfully addressing the limited computation and energy supply of batter-free devices.