CIF: Small: Ensuring robustness of communication between networked energy harvesting nodes

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Solar energy, ambient radio frequency energy, and mechanical vibrations, among others, provide opportunities for energy harvesting from the environment. Typically, it is feasible to store some of the harvested energy in a rechargeable local battery for future use. Energy harvesting devices are therefore expected to soon play a major role as components of networks monitoring critical infrastructure, such as transportation networks and the smart grid. This development is also synergistic with the growth of the Internet of Things, with the number of devices connected to the network being two orders of magnitude more than what we have today. The development of energy harvesting in the context of critical infrastructure technologies is of central importance to the national interest and its development in the context of the Internet of Things offers profound benefits to society. The educational component of this project includes training graduate students, exposing undergraduate students to research, and transitioning the results of the research to core graduate and undergraduate courses. The research in this project addresses the fundamental communications challenges posed by energy harvesting sensing networks in both the context of monitoring critical infrastructure and the Internet of Things. The research develops systematic techniques to design communication networks of sensing energy harvesting nodes that are robust to the variations in the energy harvesting process. The appropriate models to use depend on the relation between the time scale of the energy harvesting and the time scales inherent to the physical system being sensed, estimated, and controlled. This project studies both information theoretic and packet-drop models, corresponding respectively to fast or slow time scales for energy harvesting relative to the dynamics of the physical system.