Feasibility of multi-tenancy on intermittent power

Abstract

Energy harvesting and battery-free sensing devices show great promise for revolutionizing computing in the home, in the wild, and on the body. The promise of cheap, dense, and ubiquitous sensing technology brings new applications for the Internet of Things. However, the future programming model is blurry and complex. With a potential for trillions of devices, and thousands of devices per person on earth, programming languages and associated operating systems must be usable, flexible, and resource efficient. Because of the thousands of applications and fine grained differences in requirements, multi-tenancy may be a part of the solution to solving this programming model crisis. This paper explores the energy and resources costs, feasibility, and motivation for multi-tenancy on these tiniest of computing devices---namely the difficulties in scheduling tasks fairly, efficiently, and simply. Because of intermittent power, resources and energy must be mostly devoted towards user tasks, we implement a rudimentary operating system with low overhead to conduct experiments and test time-sharing and scheduling protocols. We close with a discussion on challenges to implementing a multi-tenant run-time on battery-free tags, and proposals for future work.