A Survey of Prototyping Platforms for Intermittent Computing Research

Batteryless energy harvesting platforms are gaining popularity as a way to bring next-generation sensing and edge computing devices to deployments previously limited by their need for batteries. Energy harvesting enables perpetual, maintenance-free operation, but also introduces new challenges associated with unreliable environmental power as systems face common-case, yet unpredictable power failures. Software execution on these devices is an active area of research: intermittently executed software must correctly and efficiently handle arbitrary interruption, frequent state saving/restoration, and re-execution of certain code segments as part of a normal operation. The wide application range for batteryless systems combined with strict limitations on size and performance means there is little overlap in batteryless system prototypes---platforms are chosen for familiarity or specific features in a given application. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of different intermittent computing approaches varies widely across devices. As a result, intermittent computing research is at best hard to generalize across platforms and at worst contradictory across studies.