NetSE: Medium: Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs)

这项研究将设计和实现能量收集有源联网标签(EnHANT)：可以连接到传统上未联网的任意对象上的小型设备，如书籍、家具、墙壁、门、玩具、钥匙、产品和服装。EnHANT以一种延迟容忍的方式收集能量，建立网络，并调整其通信和网络机制以满足其现有的能量限制。标签将是薄的，机械上灵活的，而且很小-最多几平方厘米。EnHANT是一种颠覆性和变革性的技术，它能够实现传统技术所不能提供的新型目标跟踪应用，如遗失物品恢复、灾难恢复、紧急警报和时空邻近信息。EnHANT需要一个超高能效的体系结构和设计，以便仅使用通过采集积累的能量来有效运行。这种严格的能源限制施加了超低功率要求，远远低于蓝牙和Zigbee等传统标准。满足这些要求使EnHANT能够在明显更受能源限制的环境中保持功能。考虑到严重的能源限制，需要彻底重新考虑如何执行能源收集和存储、通信和联网。PI采用全面的跨层设计方法，结合了网络、通信、低功率电子和有机能量收集设备方面的专业知识，使效率提高了几个数量级，使EnHANT成为可能。将部署和测试联网标签的测试平台，展示使用定制硬件开发的能量收集、通信和联网组件。研究导致基于低功耗、能量收集标签的新应用和服务，社会将从中受益匪浅。

This research will design and implement energy-harvesting active networked tags (EnHANTs): small devices that can be attached to arbitrary objects that are traditionally not networked, such as books, furniture, walls, doors, toys, keys, produce, and clothing. EnHANTs harvest energy, network in a delay-tolerant fashion, and adapt their communications and networking mechanisms to satisfy their existing energy constraints. The tags will be thin, mechanically flexible, and small - a few square cm at most. EnHANTs are a disruptive and transformational technology that enables novel object tracking applications which are unavailable with conventional technologies, such as lost item recovery, disaster recovery, emergency alerts, and spatio-temporal proximity information.EnHANTs require a super-energy efficient architecture and design to operate effectively using only energy accumulated via harvesting. Such severe energy restrictions impose ultra-low power requirements that are much lower than traditional standards such as Bluetooth and Zigbee. Meeting these requirements gives EnHANTs the capability to remain functional in environments that are significantly more energy constrained. Given the severe energy constraints, a total rethinking of how to perform the energy harvesting and storage, communications, and networking is needed. The PIs take a comprehensive cross-layer design approach that combines expertise in networking, communications, low-power electronics, and organic energy-harvesting devices to make the efficiency improvements of several orders of magnitude that make EnHANTs possible. A test platform of networked tags will be deployed and tested demonstrating the energy harvesting, communication, and networking components developed using custom hardware.The research leads to new applications and services based on the low power, energy harvesting tags, that society can benefit from in a significant way.