Aman Kansal

Power management in energy harvesting sensor networks

Power management is an important concern in sensor networks, because a tethered energy infrastructure is usually not available and an obvious concern is to use the available battery energy efficiently. However, in some of the sensor networking applications, an additional facility is available to ameliorate the energy problem: harvesting energy from the environment. Certain considerations in using an energy harvesting source are fundamentally different from that in using a battery, because, rather than a limit on the maximum energy, it has a limit on the maximum rate at which the energy can be used. Further, the harvested energy availability typically varies with time in a nondeterministic manner. While a deterministic metric, such as residual battery, suffices to characterize the energy availability in the case of batteries, a more sophisticated characterization may be required for a harvesting source. Another issue that becomes important in networked systems with multiple harvesting nodes is that different nodes may have different harvesting opportunity. In a distributed application, the same end-user performance may be achieved using different workload allocations, and resultant energy consumptions at multiple nodes. In this case, it is important to align the workload allocation with the energy availability at the harvesting nodes. We consider the above issues in power management for energy-harvesting sensor networks. We develop abstractions to characterize the complex time varying nature of such sources with analytically tractable models and use them to address key design issues. We also develop distributed methods to efficiently use harvested energy and test these both in simulation and experimentally on an energy-harvesting sensor network, prototyped for this work.

Design considerations for solar energy harvesting wireless embedded systems

Sustainable operation of battery powered wireless embedded systems (such as sensor nodes) is a key challenge, and considerable research effort has been devoted to energy optimization of such systems. Environmental energy harvesting, in particular solar based, has emerged as a viable technique to supplement battery supplies. However, designing an efficient solar harvesting system to realize the potential benefits of energy harvesting requires an in-depth understanding of several factors. For example, solar energy supply is highly time varying and may not always be sufficient to power the embedded system. Harvesting components, such as solar panels, and energy storage elements, such as batteries or ultracapacitors, have different voltage-current characteristics, which must be matched to each other as well as the energy requirements of the system to maximize harvesting efficiency. Further, battery non-idealities, such as self-discharge and round trip efficiency, directly affect energy usage and storage decisions. The ability of the system to modulate its power consumption by selectively deactivating its sub-components also impacts the overall power management architecture. This paper describes key issues and tradeoffs which arise in the design of solar energy harvesting, wireless embedded systems and presents the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of Heliomote, our prototype that addresses several of these issues. Experimental results demonstrate that Heliomote, which behaves as a plug-in to the Berkeley/Crossbow motes and autonomously manages energy harvesting and storage, enables near-perpetual, harvesting aware operation of the sensor node.

Virtual machine power metering and provisioning

Virtualization is often used in cloud computing platforms for its several advantages in efficiently managing resources. However, virtualization raises certain additional challenges, and one of them is lack of power metering for virtual machines (VMs). Power management requirements in modern data centers have led to most new servers providing power usage measurement in hardware and alternate solutions exist for older servers using circuit and outlet level measurements. However, VM power cannot be measured purely in hardware. We present a solution for VM power metering, named Joulemeter. We build power models to infer power consumption from resource usage at runtime and identify the challenges that arise when applying such models for VM power metering. We show how existing instrumentation in server hardware and hypervisors can be used to build the required power models on real platforms with low error. Our approach is designed to operate with extremely low runtime overhead while providing practically useful accuracy. We illustrate the use of the proposed metering capability for VM power capping, a technique to reduce power provisioning costs in data centers. Experiments are performed on server traces from several thousand production servers, hosting Microsofts real-world applications such as Windows Live Messenger. The results show that not only does VM power metering allows virtualized data centers to achieve the same savings that non-virtualized data centers achieved through physical server power capping, but also that it enables further savings in provisioning costs with virtualization.

Q-clouds: managing performance interference effects for QoS-aware clouds

Cloud computing offers users the ability to access large pools of computational and storage resources on demand. Multiple commercial clouds already allow businesses to replace, or supplement, privately owned IT assets, alleviating them from the burden of managing and maintaining these facilities. However, there are issues that must be addressed before this vision of utility computing can be fully realized. In existing systems, customers are charged based upon the amount of resources used or reserved, but no guarantees are made regarding the application level performance or quality-of-service (QoS) that the given resources will provide. As cloud providers continue to utilize virtualization technologies in their systems, this can become problematic. In particular, the consolidation of multiple customer applications onto multicore servers introduces performance interference between collocated workloads, significantly impacting application QoS. To address this challenge, we advocate that the cloud should transparently provision additional resources as necessary to achieve the performance that customers would have realized if they were running in isolation. Accordingly, we have developed Q-Clouds, a QoS-aware control framework that tunes resource allocations to mitigate performance interference effects. Q-Clouds uses online feedback to build a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) model that captures performance interference interactions, and uses it to perform closed loop resource management. In addition, we utilize this functionality to allow applications to specify multiple levels of QoS as application Q-states. For such applications, Q-Clouds dynamically provisions underutilized resources to enable elevated QoS levels, thereby improving system efficiency. Experimental evaluations of our solution using benchmark applications illustrate the benefits: performance interference is mitigated completely when feasible, and system utilization is improved by up to 35% using Q-states.

Controllably mobile infrastructure for low energy embedded networks

We discuss the use of mobility to enhance network performance for a certain class of applications in sensor networks. A major performance bottleneck in sensor networks is energy since it is impractical to replace the batteries in embedded sensor nodes post-deployment. A significant portion of the energy expenditure is attributed to communications and, in particular, the nodes close to the sensor network gateways used for data collection typically suffer a large overhead as these nodes must relay data from the remaining network. Even with compression and in-network processing to reduce the amount of communicated data, all the processed data must still traverse these nodes to reach the gateway. We discuss a network infrastructure based on the use of controllably mobile elements to reduce the communication energy consumption at the energy constrained nodes and, thus, increase useful network lifetime. In addition, our approach yields advantages in delay-tolerant networks and sparsely deployed networks. We first show how our approach helps reduce energy consumption at battery constrained nodes. Second, we describe our system prototype, which utilizes our proposed approach to improve the energy performance. As part of the prototyping effort, we experienced several interesting design choices and trade-offs that affect system capabilities and performance. We describe many of these design challenges and discuss the algorithms developed for addressing these. In particular, we focus on network protocols and motion control strategies. Our methods are tested using a practical system and do not assume idealistic radio range models or operation in unobstructed environments

Intelligent fluid infrastructure for embedded networks

Computer networks have historically considered support for mobile devices as an extra overhead to be borne by the system. Recently however, researchers have proposed methods by which the network can take advantage of mobile components. We exploit mobility to develop a fluid infrastructure: mobile components are deliberately built into the system infrastructure for enabling specific functionality that is very hard to achieve using other methods. Built-in intelligence helps our system adapt to run time dynamics when pursuing pre-defined performance objectives. Our approach yields significant advantages for energy constrained systems, sparsely deployed networks, delay tolerant networks, and in security sensitive situations. We first show why our approach is advantageous in terms of network lifetime and data fidelity. Second, we present adaptive algorithms that are used to control mobility. Third, we design the communication protocol supporting a fluid infrastructure and long sleep durations on energy-constrained devices. Our algorithms are not based on abstract radio range models or idealized unobstructed environments but founded on real world behavior of wireless devices. We implement a prototype system in which infrastructure components move autonomously to carry out important networking tasks. The prototype is used to validate and evaluate our suggested mobility control methods.

SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing

Peer-produced systems can achieve what might be infeasible for stand-alone systems developed by a single entity. The SenseWebs goal is to enable these kinds of capabilities. Using SenseWeb, applications can initiate and access sensor data streams from shared sensors across the entire Internet. The SenseWeb infrastructure helps ensure optimal sensor selection for each application and efficient sharing of sensor streams among multiple applications.

Tiny web services: design and implementation of interoperable and evolvable sensor networks

We present a web service based approach to enable an evolutionary sensornet system where additional sensor nodes may be added after the initial deployment. The functionality and data provided by the new nodes is exposed in a structured manner, so that multiple applications may access them. The result is a highly inter-operable system where multiple applications can share a common evolving sensor substrate. A key challenge in using web services on resource constrained sensor nodes is the energy and bandwidth overhead of the structured data formats used in web services. Our work provides a detailed evaluation of the overheads and presents an implementation on a representative sensor platform with 48k of ROM, 10k of RAM and a 802.15.4 radio. We identify design choices that optimize the web service operation on resource constrained sensor nodes, including support for low latency messaging and sleep modes, quantifying trade-offs between the design generality and resource efficiency. We also prototyped an example application, for home energy management, demonstrating how evolutionary sensor networks can be supported with our approach.

Energy-accuracy trade-off for continuous mobile device location

Mobile applications often need location data, to update locally relevant information and adapt the device context. While most smartphones do include a GPS receiver, its frequent use is restricted due to high battery drain. We design and prototype an adaptive location service for mobile devices, a-Loc, that helps reduce this battery drain. Our design is based on the observation that the required location accuracy varies with location, and hence lower energy and lower accuracy localization methods, such as those based on WiFi and cell-tower triangulation, can sometimes be used. Our method automatically determines the dynamic accuracy requirement for mobile search-based applications. As the user moves, both the accuracy requirements and the location sensor errors change. A-Loc continually tunes the energy expenditure to meet the changing accuracy requirements using the available sensors. A Bayesian estimation framework is used to model user location and sensor errors. Experiments are performed with Android G1 and AT&T Tilt phones, on paths that include outdoor and indoor locations, using war-driving data from Google and Microsoft. The experiments show that a-Loc not only provides significant energy savings, but also improves the accuracy achieved, because it uses multiple sensors.

Performance aware tasking for environmentally powered sensor networks

The use of environmental energy is now emerging as a feasible energy source for embedded and wireless computing systems such as sensor networks where manual recharging or replacement of batteries is not practical. However, energy supply from environmental sources is highly variable with time. Further, for a distributed system, the energy available at its various locations will be different. These variations strongly influence the way in which environmental energy is used. We present a harvesting theory for determining performance in such systems. First we present a model for characterizing environmental sources. Second, we state and prove two harvesting theorems that help determine the sustainable performance level from a particular source. This theory leads to practical techniques for scheduling processes in energy harvesting systems. Third, we present our implementation of a real embedded system that runs on solar energy and uses our harvesting techniques. The system adjusts its performance level in response to available resources. Fourth, we propose a localized algorithm for increasing the performance of a distributed system by adapting the process scheduling to the spatio-temporal characteristics of the environmental energy in the distributed system. While our theoretical intuition is based on certain abstractions, all the scheduling methods we present are motivated solely from the experimental behavior and resource constraints of practical sensor networking systems.