Energy-efficient platform designs for real-world wireless sensing applications

Abstract

Real-world wireless sensing applications demand system platforms with a wide range of size, cost, power consumption, connectivity, performance, and flexibility requirements. These goals cannot be achieved without understanding the nature of the sensing functions in the first place, which can be classified into passive vs. active sensing, event detection vs. data acquisition, and real-time monitoring vs. data logging. This paper discusses platform design techniques for supporting these design goals through the trade-offs of sensing devices, wireless interfaces, and computation and control units. We also cover power subsystem design for supply-aware optimizations, including load/supply matching, power defragmentation in multi-supply systems, and use of supercapacitors. To evaluate these system platforms, we describe an emulation-based benchmarking methodology to quantify fitness metrics.