Back From The Dead: Enabling Timely Computation and Communication in Batteryless Intermittently-powered Sensor Nodes

Batteryless sensor nodes powered solely by energy harvesting are a promising alternative to battery-powered sensor nodes. However, since the energy harvesting rate from these sources is often very low, unreliable, and time-varying, nodes cannot sustain a continuous operation, making them intermittently powered with unpredictable wakeup times. Moreover, energy harvesting rates differ significantly across deployment scenarios, influenced by environmental conditions, technology, and source availability. Current platforms are mainly designed to be best-effort with performance and reliability dictated by variations in incident input power. Therefore, application that demand critical end-to-end latency fails to achieve high Quality of Services (QOS) due to nodes not being able to compute and communicate in a timely and coordinated manner. Along with collecting, recording and distributing debug information, we propose a novel platform that enable robust coordination of on-times, timely computing and communication. Preliminary results on parts of our platform show nearly 99% coordination between pairs of sensor nodes and over 10x performance benefits for time critical inference tasks.