Deterministic 40 year battery lifetime through a hybrid perpetual sensing platform (HyPer)

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant traction in recent years, resulting in the deployment of billions of devices. These devices offer a typical battery life that ranges from several months to several years, which results in two problems. Batteries must be replaced, increasing maintenance costs, and toxic batteries are abandoned, damaging the environment. Recent advances in battery technology have delivered primary batteries with a lifetime of 40 years, however, the average power that can be delivered over the lifetime is extremely limited. Energy harvesting is a promising alternative, however, energy harvesting systems are fragile in the face of power failures, which has prevented their widespread adoption. This paper tackles this problem by introducing the HyPer IoT platform, which delivers a deterministic 40 year battery life, through a combination of energy harvesting and a long life primary battery. To mitigate environmental dynamism, HyPer provides a self-adaptive software stack that matches system performance against available environmental energy. Our evaluations show that HyPer reliably achieves a 40 year battery lifetime, with a task schedulability of close to 95.4% of the available energy, while energy harvesting significantly improves performance in comparison to batteries alone.