EAGER: Hardware and Software Architecture for Wireless Sensing Systems Under Dynamic Load and Energy Availability

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton FL

Investigators

Abstract

The Internet of Things echoes the ubiquitous computing vision, capturing a deeply connected world populated by intelligent objects, structures, and materials. Resource-constrained devices that operate from ephemeral energy sources have a prominent role to play in this vision. This project is enabling a new class of embedded system that is inherently robust and adaptive in the presence of dynamic load and harvesting conditions - conditions that will be pervasive in the emerging Internet of Things. The project is designing and evaluating fundamental hardware and software extensions that are radically different from existing approaches, with potentially transformative results. At the same time, the project is providing research training for undergraduate and graduate students, contributing to broadening participation, and driving progress toward a new system for detecting underground leaks in irrigation systems. The technical plan involves four related thrusts: (1) The team is exploring a new energy harvesting and discharge architecture based on the concept of federated energy storage. The new architecture enables dynamic control of charge and discharge priorities, as well as real-valued inputs regarding each component?s charge state. (2) The team is exploring new operating system services for managing charge and discharge priorities, as well as for querying the current charge state of each component. (3) The team is exploring new approaches to calculating component service life based on state-of-charge information. (4) Finally, the team is building an operational testbed for evaluating the utility of the resulting techniques, leveraging ongoing work in the detection of residential irrigation leaks.