Energy autonomous sensor systems: Towards a ubiquitous sensor technology

Energy efficiency of electronic systems has emerged as one of the most important trends in integrated circuits research in recent years. The results of this continued effort are visible in all kinds of electronic functions: DSPs (reaching the 10 μW/MMAC according Gene's law), data converters (the FOM of recent ADCs is approaching 15 fJ/conversion step [1] (Liu et al., 2010)), power converters (reaching unprecedented efficiencies in ultra-low-power regime) and radios (achieving an energy budget lower than 1 nJ per received-transmitted bit [2] and [3] (Daly et al., 2010; Mercier et al., 2008)).Exploiting this continuously improving energy efficiency, the progressing battery technology and advances in energy harvesting, miniaturized electronic sensors that do not need to be recharged for their whole operational life and can communicate among them to build up an energy-autonomous system are possible nowadays.A working group has been set up by CATRENE¹ to study the state and the development of these “energy autonomous systems”. This paper summarizes the findings of the working group, expanding and updating in this special issue of the Microelectronics Journal on IWASI09 the report written for the proceedings of the workshop [4] (Belleville et al., 2008).     

On-demand power management for ad hoc networks

Battery power is an important resource in ad hoc networks. It has been observed that in ad hoc networks, energy consumption does not reflect the communication activities in the network. Many existing energy conservation protocols based on electing a routing backbone for global connectivity are oblivious to traffic characteristics. In this paper, we propose an extensible on-demand power management framework for ad hoc networks that adapts to traffic load. Nodes maintain soft-state timers that determine power management transitions. By monitoring routing control messages and data transmission, these timers are set and refreshed on-demand. Nodes that are not involved in data delivery may go to sleep as supported by the MAC protocol. This soft state is aggregated across multiple flows and its maintenance requires no additional out-of-band messages. We implement a prototype of our framework in the ns-2 simulator that uses the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Simulation studies using our scheme with the Dynamic Source Routing protocol show a reduction in energy consumption near 50% when compared to a network without power management under both long-lived CBR traffic and on–off traffic loads, with comparable throughput and latency. Preliminary results also show that it outperforms existing routing backbone election approaches.     

Energy characterization of mobile devices and applications using power-thermal benchmarks

Power consumption and heat dissipation are the major factors that limit the performance and mobility of battery-powered devices. As they become key elements in the design of mobile devices and their applications, different power and thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented during the previous years in order to overcome the mobility limitation due to the battery lifetime. A new energy management approach is to build energy-aware applications so that we have knowledge on the consumed energy while the device is running. In this paper we define two new types of benchmarks, called power and thermal benchmark, which are software applications intended for the run-time system level to provide power and thermal characterization. These benchmarks are an easy way for the applications to adapt their execution pattern, in order to finish their tasks both in time and in the battery lifetime.     

Power Management and Data Rate Maximization in Wireless Energy Harvesting Sensors

This paper considers the problem of power management and throughput maximization for energy neutral operation when using an energy harvesting sensor (EHS) to send data over a wireless link. The EHS is assumed to be able to harvest energy at a constant rate, and use a fixed part of the energy harvested in a slot for measuring the channel state. The rest of the energy harvested is available for transmission, however, it can be stored in an inefficient battery if it is not fully utilized. The key constraint that the EHS needs to satisfy is energy neutrality, i.e., the expected energy drawn from the battery should equal the expected energy deposited into the battery. In this scenario, two popular models for data transmission are contrasted: the constant bit rate (CBR) model and the variable bit rate (VBR) model. In the CBR model, it is assumed that the EHS are designed to transmit data at a constant rate (using a fixed modulation and coding scheme) but are power-controlled. In the VBR model, the EHS selects both the transmit power and the data rate of transmission in each slot based on the channel instantiation. A framework under which the system designer can optimize several parameters of the EHS that determine the average data rate performance when the channel is Rayleigh fading is developed. Using this framework, the two transmission schemes are contrasted. It is shown that, with the right choice of parameter settings, the CBR scheme can perform nearly as well as the VBR scheme at significantly lower complextiy. The usefulness and validity of the framework developed is illustrated through simulations for specific examples.

Theory and simulation of a thermally matched micromachined thermopile in a wearable energy harvester

In this paper, a new theoretical concept in the thermoelectric theory is discussed, which is important for design optimization of a thermoelectric energy harvester. The general conditions are defined, which are required to make a thermoelectric converter effective in energy harvester application. The necessity of the work has been prompted by the fact that while modeling the harvesters neither a constant temperature difference nor a constant heat flow can be assumed. It is shown that the proposed equations allow thermal optimization of energy harvesters to reach their top performance characteristics. The example of thermal optimization in case of MEMS thermopiles is discussed then. It is shown that the knowledge of thermal properties of the environment, i.e., those of a heat source and a heat sink, play the key role in the optimization procedure.     

Energy efficient routing in ad hoc disaster recovery networks

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 have drawn attention to the use of wireless technology in order to locate survivors of structural collapse. We propose to construct an ad hoc network of wireless smart badges in order to acquire information from trapped survivors. We investigate the energy efficient routing problem that arises in such a network and show that since smart badges have very limited power sources and very low data rates, which may be inadequate in an emergency situation, the solution of the routing problem requires new protocols. The problem is formulated as an anycast routing problem in which the objective is to maximize the time until the first battery drains-out. We present iterative algorithms for obtaining the optimal solution of the problem. Then, we derive an upper bound on the network lifetime for specific topologies and describe a polynomial algorithm for obtaining the optimal solution in such topologies. Finally, numerical results regarding the upper bound and the algorithms are presented.     

Performance evaluation of nonlinear energy scavenging overlay networks

This paper investigates a nonlinear energy scavenging overlay network (NLESON) wherein a primary source (PS) communicates with a primary destination (PD) probably under aid of a secondary source (SS) who communicates with a secondary destination (SD). SS is a power-constrained device, and thence, its operation relies on energy harvested by a practical nonlinear energy scavenger. To support PS and exploit the harvested energy at most, SS adaptively switches between single and superposition modes where the single mode allows SS to transmit solely its signal with the entire harvested energy and the superposition mode asks SS to transmit both—its signal and amplified primary signal—with different power fractions. Moreover, for increasing the probability of successfully decoding primary signal at PD and SD, which then reduces considerably primary interference on secondary signal in the superposition mode, we leverage both direct channels (PS-PD and PS-SD) and apply both signal combining paradigms (maximum ratio combining and selection combining). The outage/throughput performance of the NLESON is assessed quickly through the proposed closed-form expressions over $\kappa -\mu$ shadowed fading channels. Various results exposed the effectiveness of the aforementioned solutions for the NLESON and their flexibility in controlling system performance.     

不同模式下微电网的能源管理和调度优化

微电网在智慧电网中是非常重要的,确保微电网的最佳和稳定运行是非常必要的.本研究根据微电网并网和孤岛运行模式下的优先级和目标,分别实现了两种优化算法.为了在每种模式下实现最佳运行,该方案降低负载,确定光伏发电水平,并调节储能系统(ESS)的充放电水平.在仿真实验中证明了该调度方法的有效性.并且从实验结果可知,所提出的方案...     

Thermal management of power electronics modules packaged by a stacked-plate technique

The research presented in this paper is part of a multidisciplinary research program of the Center for Power Electronics Systems at Virginia Tech. The program supported by the Office of Naval Research focuses on the development of innovative technologies for packaging power electronics building blocks. The primary objective of this research is to improve package performance and reliability through thermal management, i.e., reducing device temperatures for a given power level. The task of thermal management involves considering trade-offs in the electrical design, package layout and geometry, materials selection and processing, manufacturing feasibility, and production cost. Based on the electrical design of a simple building block, samples of packaged modules, rated at 600 V and 3.3 kW, were fabricated using a stacked-plate technique, termed metal posts interconnected parallel plate structure (MPIPPS). The MPIPPS technique allows the power devices to be interconnected between two direct-bond copper substrates via the use of metal posts. Thermal modeling results on the MPIPPS packaged modules indicate that the new packaging technique offers a superior thermal management means for packaging power electronics modules.     

Energy efficient node-to-node authentication and communication confidentiality in wireless sensor networks

A distributed Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of low-end devices with wireless message exchange capabilities. Due to the scarcity of hardware resources, the lack of network infrastructures, and the threats to security, implementing secure pair-wise communications among any pair of sensors is a challenging problem in distributed WSNs. In particular, memory and energy consumption as well as resilience to sensor physical compromise are the most stringent requirements. In this paper, we introduce a new threat model to communications confidentiality in WSNs, the smart attacker model. Under this new, more realistic model, the security features of previously proposed schemes decrease drastically. We then describe a novel pseudo-random key pre-deployment strategy ESP that combines all the following properties: (a) it supports an energy-efficient key discovery phase requiring no communications; (b) it provides node to node authentication; (c) it is highly resistant to the smart attacker.We provide both asymptotic results and extensive simulations of the schemes that are beingproposed. This work was partially funded by the WEB-MINDS project supported by the Italian MIUR under the FIRB program, and by the PRIN 2003 “Web-based Management and Representation of Spatial and Geographic Data” program from the Italian MIUR. Roberto Di Pietro is partially funded by ISTI-CNR, WNLab, Pisa, with a Post-doc grant under the IS-MANET program. Roberto Di Pietro received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy, in 2004. He received the Bs. and Ms. degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1994. Since 1995 he has been working for the technical branch of the Italian Army and the Internal Affairs Ministry. His main research interests include: security for mobile ad hoc and wireless networks, security for distributed systems, secure multicast, applied cryptography and computer forensics. Luigi V. Mancini received the PhD degre in Computer Science from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in 1989, and the Laurea degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1983. From 2000, he is a full professor of Computer Science at the Dipartimento di Informatica of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. Since 1994, he is a visiting research professor of the Center for Secure Information Systems, GMU, Virginia, USA. Currently he is the advisor of six Ph.D students. His current research interests include: computer network and information security, wireless network security, fault-tolerant distributed systems, large-scale peer-to-peer systems, and hard-real-time distributed systems. He published more than 60 scientific papers in international conferences and journals such as: ACM TISSEC, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TPDS, and IEEE TSE. He served in the program committees of several international conferences which include: ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security, ACM Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technology, ACM Workshop of Security of Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks, IEEE Securecomm, IEEE Conference on Cluster Computing. He is also the program chair of the first two editions of the IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Peer-to-Peer Systems held in 2004 (Volendam, Holand) and in 2005 (San Diego, California). Currently, he is a member of the Scientific Board of the Italian Communication Police force, and the director of the Master degree program in Computer and Network Security of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy. Alessandro Mei received the Laurea degree in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1994, and the PhD degree in mathematics from the University of Trento, Italy, in 1999. In 1998, he was at the Department of EE-Systems of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as a visiting scholar for one year. After holding a postdoctoral position at the University of Trento, in 2001 he joined the Faculty of Science of the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy, as an assistant professor of computer science. His main research interests include security of distributed systems and networks, algorithms for parallel, distributed, and optical systems and reconfigurable computing. He was presented with the Best Paper Award of the 16th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in 2002, the EE-Systems Outstanding Research Paper Award of the University of Southern California for 2000, and the Outstanding Paper Award of the Fifth IEEE/ACM International Conference on High Performance Computing in 1998. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE and, from 2005, he is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers.     

Group key management scheme for large-scale sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are inherently collaborative environments in which sensor nodes self-organize and operate in groups that typically are dynamic and mission-driven. Secure communications in wireless sensor networks under this collaborative model calls for efficient group key management. However, providing key management services in wireless sensor networks is complicated by their ad-hoc nature, intermittent connectivity, large scale, and resource limitations. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new energy-efficient key management scheme for networks consisting of a large number of commodity sensor nodes that are randomly deployed. All sensor nodes in the network are anonymous and are preloaded with identical state information. The proposed scheme leverages a location-based virtual network infrastructure and is built upon a combinatorial formulation of the group key management problem. Secure and efficient group key initialization is achieved in the proposed scheme by nodes autonomously computing, without any communications, their respective initial group keys. The key server, in turn, uses a simple location-based hash function to autonomously deduce the mapping of the nodes to their group keys. The scheme enables dynamic setup and management of arbitrary secure group structures with dynamic group membership.     

Energy efficient power allocation for co-located antenna systems with D2D communication

This paper investigates the energy efficient resource allocation when adding dedicated device-to-device (D2D) communication in the co-located antenna systems (CAS). We consider the user equipments (UEs) are changing over time and the appropriate potential UEs to form D2D pairs are varying with time. Our optimization objective is to maximize the system’s energy efficiency (EE) with the constraints of the maximum transmit power of UEs and D2D pairs in different total power consumption models. Firstly, an algorithm is developed to choose appropriate potential UEs to form D2D pairs in this paper. Then we exploit fractional programming method to obtain optimal energy efficient power allocation solutions. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed D2D pairs choosing algorithm and the power allocation algorithm.     

Junction temperature management of IGBT module in power electronic converters

IGBT power module is the key component of the power electronic converter, but it has the lowest reliability. The junction temperature is the crucial factor which affects power module’s reliability. To some extent, the power handling capability of the converter depends on the thermal stress of the power module. Thermal management is an effective method to improve the reliability of power device, as well as enhance the power capability. For this purpose, this paper introduces the reliability design to the power converter’s traditional compensation controller design for the first time. A new concept of generalized dual-loop controller, which includes temperature control loop and electric power control loop, is proposed. The reliability and stability of the system are both considered, with the help of the hybrid controller, the power converter can operate steadily with higher reliability. The novelty of this paper is to improve the thermal control method of carrier frequency adjustment through experimental implementation during the full life cycle of the converter. The target is to control the temperature variation to be almost a constant value as well as extend the lifetime of the converter. IR sensor is used to measure the chip temperature of the unpackaged IGBT module. The temperature variation and the average temperature are all considered in thermal management, from the reliability improvement point of view. At last, the idea is digital implemented based on a varying load of power inverter system with real-time measurement of the chip’s surface temperature.     

关于电力建设工程质量控制和安全管理探析

由于电力行业伴随着持续发展进步的社会经济相应也出现急剧发展状况,在这一过程当中也暴露出诸多问题。本文尝试对电力工程现场施工管理面临的问题进行总结,随后在此基础上实施探讨相应的措施做好施工过程安全管理与控制质量。     

Uplink resource allocation and power control for D2D communications underlaying multi-cell mobile networks

Proximity user equipments (UEs) in mobile networks may be communicated directly without passing their traffic through the base station by using device-to-device (D2D) communications. This can be done using the underlaying approach in which the D2D-UEs (DEs) are allowed to use the same resources allocated for cellular UEs (CEs), which can enhance the spectral efficiency. However, if the resource allocation for DEs is not designed appropriately, it would generate harmful interference on CEs communications. Therefore, this paper addresses a resource allocation and power control problems for D2D communications underlaying multi-cell mobile networks with the consideration of the inter-cell and intra-cell interferences. The problem is formulated to maximise the network performance in terms of achieved throughput while ensuring the quality-of-service (QoS) constraints for CEs and DEs. A two-step algorithm is proposed in which the admission control is performed firstly to determine the set of possible D2D connections and their CE partners that achieve the minimum QoS demands. Then, the optimal power for each permissible DE and its possible partners in different cells are allocated to maximise the network throughput. Simulation results illustrate that the suggested algorithm can remarkably enhance the performance of the network in terms of throughput gain and access rate.     

Dynamic power management in new architecture of wireless sensor networks

Dynamic power management (DPM) technology has been widely used in sensor networks. Though many specific technical challenges remain and deserve much further study, the primary factor currently limiting progress in sensor networks is not these challenges but is instead the lack of an overall sensor network architecture. In this paper, we first develop a new architecture of sensor networks. Then we modify the sleep state policy developed by Sinha and Chandrakasan in (IEEE Design Test Comput. 2001; 18 (2):62–74) and deduce that a new threshold satisfies the sleep‐state transition policy. Under this new architecture, nodes in deeper sleep states consume lower energy while asleep, but require longer delays and higher latency costs to awaken. Implementing DPM with considering the battery status and probability of event generation will reduce the energy consumption and prolong the whole lifetime of the sensor networks. We also propose a new energy‐efficient DPM, which is a modified sleep state policy and combined with optimal geographical density control (OGDC) (Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks 2005; 1 (1–2):89–123) to keep a minimal number of sensor nodes in the active mode in wireless sensor networks. Implementing dynamic power management with considering the battery status, probability of event generation and OGDC will reduce the energy consumption and prolong the whole lifetime of the sensor networks. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

家庭微网储能分组能量管理优化策略

在家庭能量管理系统中,可再生能源的发电功率具有不确定性和间断性,成为影响家庭能量优化调度的因素.储能系统在优化过程中过多充放电次数也会增加储能折旧费用.针对上述问题,文中提出一种储能分组能量管理优化策略.根据可再生能源出力不确定部分和确定部分为储能系统配置充电部分和调度部分.首先建立风力发电系统、光伏发电系统和储能系统...     

Statistical power supply dynamic noise prediction in hierarchical power grid and package networks

One of the most crucial high performance systems-on-chip design challenge is to front their power supply noise sufferance due to high frequencies, huge number of functional blocks and technology scaling down. Marking a difference from traditional post physical-design static voltage drop analysis, a priori dynamic voltage drop evaluation is the focus of this work. It takes into account transient currents and on-chip and package RLC parasitics while exploring the power grid design solution space: Design countermeasures can be thus early defined and long post physical-design verification cycles can be shortened. As shown by an extensive set of results, a carefully extracted and modular grid library assures realistic evaluation of parasitics impact on noise and facilitates the power network construction; furthermore statistical analysis guarantees a correct current envelope evaluation and Spice simulations endorse reliable results.     

A novel low-power transceiver topology for noncontact vital sign detection including the power management technique

In this paper, power management technique utilized in the direct down-conversion non-quadrature transceiver is presented for the low-power application of vital sign detection. The simultaneous switching noise (SSN) and overshoot and undershoot of the transient waveform distortion resulting from a pulse signal will give rise to interference with a vital sign signal. The pulse width, rise/fall time, and period of pulse bias are analyzed to mitigate the interference in this investigation. Significant issues about direct-current (DC) offset and noise confronted by the presented technique are addressed based on mathematical analysis. In radio-frequency (RF) transceiver architecture including power amplifier (PA), low-noise amplifier (LNA), and mixer, the current-reused (CRU) topology is utilized to achieve low DC power consumption. The post-layout simulation results exhibit that power consumption of the transceiver using the optimized pulse bias is reduced to 40% of the power consumption for transceiver applying the DC bias. In addition, DC offset and null detection point can be alleviated by tunable phase shifter.     

Power proximity based key management for secure multicast in ad hoc networks

As group-oriented services become the focal point of ad hoc network applications, securing the group communications becomes a default requirement. In this paper, we address the problem of group access in secure multicast communications for wireless ad hoc networks. We argue that energy expenditure is a scarce resource for the energy-limited ad hoc network devices and introduce a cross-layer approach for designing energy-efficient, balanced key distribution trees to perform key management. To conserve energy, we incorporate the network topology (node location), the “power proximity” between network nodes and the path loss characteristics of the medium in the key distribution tree design. We develop new algorithms for homogeneous as well as heterogeneous environments and derive their computational complexity. We present simulation studies showing the improvements achieved for three different but common environments of interest, thus illustrating the need for cross-layer design approaches for security in wireless networks. Loukas Lazos received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Electrical Engineering Department, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece, in 2000 and 2002, respectively. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle. His current research interests focus on cross-layer designs for energy-efficient key management protocols for wireless ad-hoc networks, as well as secure localization systems for sensor networks. Radha Poovendran received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1999. He has been an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle, since September 2000. His research interests are in the areas of applied cryptography for multiuser environment, wireless networking, and applications of information theory to security. Dr. Poovendran is a recipient of the Faculty Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation (2001), Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office (2002), Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (2004), and the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, for his research contributions in the areas of wired and wireless multiuser security.