Task Scheduling Stabilization for Solar Energy Harvesting Internet of Things Devices

Abstract

Energy neutrality of Internet of Things devices powered with energy harvesting is a concept introduced to let these devices operate uninterruptedly. A method to achieve it is by letting the device scheduling different tasks characterized by different energy costs (and quality), depending on the current energy production of the energy harvesting subsystem and on the residual battery charge. In this context, we propose a novel scheduling problem that aims at keeping the energy neutrality of the scheduling while maximizing the overall quality of the executed tasks and minimizing the leaps of quality among consecutive tasks, so to improve the stability of the output of the device itself. We propose for this problem an algorithm based on a dynamic programming approach that can be executed even on low-power devices. By simulation we show that, with respect to the state of the art, the scheduling by our algorithm greatly improve the stability of the device with a minor penalty in terms of overall quality.