Incremental checkpointing of program state to NVRAM for transiently-powered systems

Abstract

As technology improves, it becomes possible to design autonomous, energy-harvesting networked embedded systems, a key building block for the Internet of Things. However, running from harvested energy means frequent and unpredictable power failures. Programming such Transiently Powered Computers will remain an arduous task for the software developer, unless some OS support abstracts energy management away from application design. Various approaches were proposed to address this problem. We focus on checkpointing, i.e. saving and restoring program state to and from non-volatile memory. In this paper, we propose an incremental checkpointing scheme which aims at minimizing the amount of data written to non-volatile memory, while keeping the execution overhead as low as possible.