| 1. |
- Afanasov, Mikhail, et al.
(författare)
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Battery-less zero-maintenance embedded sensing at the mithræum of circus maximus
- 2020
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Ingår i: SenSys 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 18th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. - 9781450375900 ; , s. 368-381
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present the design and evaluation of a 3.5-year embedded sensing deployment at the Mithræum of Circus Maximus, a UNESCO-protected underground archaeological site in Rome (Italy). Unique to our work is the use of energy harvesting through thermal and kinetic energy sources. The extreme scarcity and erratic availability of energy, however, pose great challenges in system software, embedded hardware, and energy management. We tackle them by testing, for the first time in a multi-year deployment, existing solutions in intermittent computing, low-power hardware, and energy harvesting. Through three major design iterations, we find that these solutions operate as isolated silos and lack integration into a complete system, performing suboptimally. In contrast, we demonstrate the efficient performance of a hardware/software co-design featuring accurate energy management and capturing the coupling between energy sources and sensed quantities. Installing a battery-operated system alongside also allows us to perform a comparative study of energy harvesting in a demanding setting. Albeit the latter reduces energy availability and thus lowers the data yield to about 22% of that provided by batteries, our system provides a comparable level of insight into environmental conditions and structural health of the site. Further, unlike existing energy-harvesting deployments that are limited to a few months of operation in the best cases, our system runs with zero maintenance since almost 2 years, including 3 months of site inaccessibility due to a COVID19 lockdown
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| 2. |
- Afanasov, M., et al.
(författare)
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Flyzone : A testbed for experimenting with aerial drone applications
- 2019
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Ingår i: MobiSys 2019 - Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. - 9781450366618 ; , s. 67-78
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- FlyZone is a testbed architecture to experiment with aerial drone applications. Unlike most existing drone testbeds that focus on low-level mechanical control, FlyZone offers a high-level API and features geared towards experimenting with application-level functionality. These include the emulation of environment influences, such as wind, and the automatic monitoring of developer-provided safety constraints, for example, to mimic obstacles. We conceive novel solutions to achieve this functionality, including a hardware/software architecture that maximizes decoupling from the main application and a custom visual localization technique expressly designed for testbed operation. We deploy two instances of FlyZone and study performance and effectiveness. We demonstrate that we realistically emulate the environment influence with a positioning error bound by the size of the smallest drone we test, that our localization technique provides a root mean square error of 9.2cm, and that detection of violations to safety constraints happens with a 50ms worst-case latency. We also report on how FlyZone supported developing three real-world drone applications, and discuss a user study demonstrating the benefits of FlyZone compared to drone simulators.
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| 3. |
- Afanasov, Mikhail, et al.
(författare)
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Software Adaptation in Wireless Sensor Networks
- 2018
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Ingår i: ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 1556-4665 .- 1556-4703. ; 12:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present design concepts, programming constructs, and automatic verification techniques to support the development of adaptive Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) software. WSNs operate at the interface between the physical world and the computing machine and are hence exposed to unpredictable environment dynamics. WSN software must adapt to these dynamics to maintain dependable and efficient operation. However, developers are left without proper support to develop adaptive functionality in WSN software. Our work fills this gap with three key contributions: (i) design concepts help developers organize the necessary adaptive functionality and understand their relations, (ii) dedicated programming constructs simplify the implementations, (iii) custom verification techniques allow developers to check the correctness of their design before deployment. We implement dedicated tool support to tie the three contributions, facilitating their practical application. Our evaluation considers representative WSN applications to analyze code metrics, synthetic simulations, and cycle-accurate emulation of popular WSN platforms. The results indicate that our work is effective in simplifying the development of adaptive WSN software; for example, implementations are provably easier to test and to maintain, the run-time overhead of our dedicated programming constructs is negligible, and our verification techniques return results in a matter of seconds.
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| 4. |
- Ahmed, Saad, et al.
(författare)
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Demystifying Energy Consumption Dynamics in Transiently Powered Computers
- 2020
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Ingår i: ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems. - : Association for Computing Machinery. - 1539-9087 .- 1558-3465. ; 19:6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Transiently powered computers (TPCs) form the foundation of the battery-less Internet of Things, using energy harvesting and small capacitors to power their operation. This kind of power supply is characterized by extreme variations in supply voltage, as capacitors charge when harvesting energy and discharge when computing. We experimentally find that these variations cause marked fluctuations in clock speed and power consumption. Such a deceptively minor observation is overlooked in existing literature. Systems are thus designed and parameterized in overly conservative ways, missing on a number of optimizations.We rather demonstrate that it is possible to accurately model and concretely capitalize on these fluctuations. We derive an energy model as a function of supply voltage and prove its use in two settings. First, we develop EPIC, a compile-time energy analysis tool. We use it to substitute for the constant power assumption in existing analysis techniques, giving programmers accurate information on worst-case energy consumption of programs. When using EPIC with existing TPC system support, run-time energy efficiency drastically improves, eventually leading up to a 350% speedup in the time to complete a fixed workload. Further, when using EPIC with existing debugging tools, it avoids unnecessary program changes that hurt energy efficiency. Next, we extend the MSPsim emulator and explore its use in parameterizing a different TPC system support. The improvements in energy efficiency yield up to more than 1000% time speedup to complete a fixed workload.
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| 5. |
- Ahmed, Saad, et al.
(författare)
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Efficient intermittent computing with differential checkpointing
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES). - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery. - 9781450367240 ; , s. 70-81
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Embedded devices running on ambient energy perform computations intermittently, depending upon energy availability. System support ensures forward progress of programs through state checkpointing in non-volatile memory. Checkpointing is, however, expensive in energy and adds to execution times. To reduce this overhead, we present DICE, a system design that efficiently achieves differential checkpointing in intermittent computing. Distinctive traits of DICE are its software-only nature and its ability to only operate in volatile main memory to determine differentials. DICE works with arbitrary programs using automatic code instrumentation, thus requiring no programmer intervention, and can be integrated with both reactive (Hibernus) or proactive (MementOS, HarvOS) checkpointing systems. By reducing the cost of checkpoints, performance markedly improves. For example, using DICE, Hibernus requires one order of magnitude shorter time to complete a fixed workload in real-world settings.
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| 6. |
- Ahmed, Saad, et al.
(författare)
-
Fast and Energy-Efficient State Checkpointing for Intermittent Computing
- 2020
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Ingår i: ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems. - : Association for Computing Machinery. - 1539-9087 .- 1558-3465. ; 19:6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Intermittently powered embedded devices ensure forward progress of programs through state checkpointing in non-volatile memory. Checkpointing is, however, expensive in energy and adds to the execution times. To minimize this overhead, we present DICE, a system that renders differential checkpointing profitable on these devices. DICE is unique because it is a software-only technique and efficient because it only operates in volatile main memory to evaluate the differential. DICE may be integrated with reactive (Hibernus) or proactive (MementOS, HarvOS) checkpointing systems, and arbitrary code can be enabled with DICE using automatic code-instrumentation requiring no additional programmer effort. By reducing the cost of checkpoints, DICE cuts the peak energy demand of these devices, allowing operation with energy buffers that are one-eighth of the size originally required, thus leading to benefits such as smaller device footprints and faster recharging to operational voltage level. The impact on final performance is striking: with DICE, Hibernus requires one order of magnitude fewer checkpoints and one order of magnitude shorter time to complete a workload in real-world settings.
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| 7. |
- Ahmed, Saad, et al.
(författare)
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The betrayal of constant power × time : Finding the missing joules of transiently-powered computers
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES). - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery. - 9781450367240 ; , s. 97-109
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Transiently-powered computers (TPCs) lay the basis for a battery-less Internet of Things, using energy harvesting and small capacitors to power their operation. This power supply is characterized by extreme variations in supply voltage, as capacitors charge when harvesting energy and discharge when computing. We experimentally find that these variations cause marked fluctuations in clock speed and power consumption, which determine energy efficiency. We demonstrate that it is possible to accurately model and concretely capitalize on these fluctuations. We derive an energy model as a function of supply voltage and develop EPIC, a compile-time energy analysis tool. We use EPIC to substitute for the constant power assumption in existing analysis techniques, giving programmers accurate information on worst-case energy consumption of programs. When using EPIC with existing TPC system support, run-time energy efficiency drastically improves, eventually leading up to a 350% speedup in the time to complete a fixed workload. Further, when using EPIC with existing debugging tools, programmers avoid unnecessary program changes that hurt energy efficiency.
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| 8. |
- Asad, H. A., et al.
(författare)
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On Securing Persistent State in Intermittent Computing
- 2020
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Ingår i: ENSsys 2020 - Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. ; , s. 8-14, s. 8-14, s. 8-14
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present the experimental evaluation of different security mechanisms applied to persistent state in intermittent computing. Whenever executions become intermittent because of energy scarcity, systems employ persistent state on non-volatile memories (NVMs) to ensure forward progress of applications. Persistent state spans operating system and network stack, as well as applications. While a device is off recharging energy buffers, persistent state on NVMs may be subject to security threats such as stealing sensitive information or tampering with configuration data, which may ultimately corrupt the device state and render the system unusable. Based on modern platforms of the Cortex M*series, we experimentally investigate the impact on typical intermittent computing workloads of different means to protect persistent state, including software and hardware implementations of staple encryption algorithms and the use of ARM TrustZone protection mechanisms. Our results indicate that i) software implementations bear a significant overhead in energy and time, sometimes harming forward progress, but also retaining the advantage of modularity and easier updates; ii) hardware implementations offer much lower overhead compared to their software counterparts, but require a deeper understanding of their internals to gauge their applicability in given application scenarios; and iii) TrustZone shows almost negligible overhead, yet it requires a different memory management and is only effective as long as attackers cannot directly access the NVMs.
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