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Powering the internet of things

Published: 11 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Various industry forecasts project that, by 2020, there will be around 50 billion devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), helping to engineer new solutions to societal-scale problems such as healthcare, energy conservation, transportation, etc. Most of these devices will be wireless due to the expense, inconvenience, or in some cases, the sheer infeasibility of wiring them. Further, many of them will have stringent size constraints. With no cord for power and limited space for a battery, powering these devices (to achieve several months to possibly years of unattended operation) becomes a daunting challenge. This paper highlights some promising directions for addressing this challenge, focusing on three main building blocks: (a) the design of ultra-low power hardware platforms that integrate computing, sensing, storage, and wireless connectivity in a tiny form factor, (b) the development of intelligent system-level power management techniques, and (c) the use of environmental energy harvesting to make IoT devices self-powered, thus decreasing -- in some cases, even eliminating -- their dependence on batteries. We discuss these building blocks in detail and illustrate case-studies of systems that use them judiciously, including the QUBE wireless embedded platform, which exploits the characteristics of emerging non-volatile memory technologies to seamlessly and efficiently enable long-running computations in systems that experience frequent power loss (i.e., intermittently powered systems).

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cover image ACM Conferences
ISLPED '14: Proceedings of the 2014 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
August 2014
398 pages
ISBN:9781450329750
DOI:10.1145/2627369
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 11 August 2014

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Author Tags

  1. energy harvesting
  2. internet of things
  3. low power
  4. perpetual systems
  5. power management
  6. wearable computing

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ISLPED '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 63 of 184 submissions, 34%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 398 of 1,159 submissions, 34%

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