The EH Model: Analytical Exploration of Energy-Harvesting Architectures

Abstract

Energy-harvesting devices—which operate solely on energy collected from their environment—have brought forth a new paradigm of intermittent computing. These devices succumb to frequent power outages that would cause conventional systems to be stuck in a perpetual loop of restarting computation and never making progress. Ensuring forward progress in an intermittent execution model is difficult and requires saving state in non-volatile memory. In this work, we propose the EH model to explore the trade-offs associated with backing up data to maximize forward progress. In particular, we focus on the relationship between energy and forward progress and how they are impacted by backups/restores to derive insights for programmers and architects.