An extensible system simulator for intermittently-powered multiple-peripheral IoT devices

Abstract

Energy harvesting is an alternative to achieve maintenance-free IoT devices. However, the intermittent and low-intensity ambient power supply poses a great challenge to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) of these applications. Adequate QoS simulation is required to evaluate the system design before deployment. Unfortunately, existing simulators lack supports on neither system-level behaviors under power failure circumstances nor the modeling mechanism for peripheral functionality and energy-related parameters. This paper proposes a system-level simulator named AES to evaluate and assist the intermittently-powered system (IPS) design. Adopting a flexible energy message handling framework and an easily-configured virtual device interface, AES supports both functionality and energy-related behavior simulation of all hardware modules under intermittent power scenarios. A hardware prototype is established and validates that the deviation of AES is less than 6.4%, which is adequate for IoT applications. With AES, this paper also explores the impact and design space of the system parameters in an IPS and provides a group of design guidelines to improve the performance by 37.2% in average, which reveals the potential of AES on IPS design.