CAREER: Ultra-Low Power Radios for Energy-Autonomous Systems

用不了多久，小型的、无处不在的传感器就会进入千台机器。人们每天都在无意识地与之互动。到2020年，全球一半的人口预计将拥有超过1000个传感器，这意味着部署的传感器将超过3万亿个。这个数字很容易让今天的整个半导体市场相形见绌。因此，包含可充电本地能量存储、能量收集和超低功耗电子设备的能量自主传感器对于实现这种规模的设备部署至关重要。这个CAREER项目解决了无线通信领域的关键需求，以满足无处不在的能源自主传感设备这一不断增长的领域。考虑到这些设备的小尺寸，无线计算设备中电子设备所消耗的能量与可以存储和收集的能量之间的能量差距越来越大。该项目正在探索解决无线通信功耗的新技术，无线通信通常占现代传感器节点总功耗的主导地位。该研究解决了为广泛的应用改进无线信道建模的需要，并改进了这些信道的测量方法。此外，新的无线通信电路和架构正在开发中，包括用于同步传感器网络的唤醒和时钟采集接收器。超低功率无线电也正在开发中，以解决无线电的功耗和它们在密集无线环境中的性能之间的权衡。这个项目很重要，因为它解决了扩展无线传感器节点的一个障碍——无线通信功耗的大幅降低和射频能量收集的创新可能会使新的传感器网络应用成为可能。

It will not be long until vanishingly-small, ubiquitous sensors find their way into the 1000?s of objects that people unconsciously interact with on a daily basis. With half of the global population projected to have over 1000 sensors in their lives by 2020, this translates into over 3 trillion sensors deployed ? a number that easily dwarfs the entire semiconductor market today. Energy-autonomous sensors containing rechargeable local energy storage, energy harvesting, and ultra-low power electronics are therefore essential for enabling devices to be deployed at this scale. This CAREER project addresses critical needs in the area of wireless communication for this growing field of ubiquitous, energy-autonomous sensing devices. There is a growing energy gap between the power consumed by electronics in wireless computing devices, and the amount of energy that can be stored and harvested considering the small form-factor of these devices. This project is exploring new technologies to address the power consumption of wireless communication, which typically dominates the total power consumption of modern sensor nodes. The research addresses the needs for improving the modeling of wireless channels for a wide range of applications and improving the means by which these channels are measured. Additionally, new wireless communication circuits and architectures are being developed, including wakeup and clock harvesting receivers for the purpose of synchronizing sensor networks. Ultra-low power radios are also being developed to address the tradeoffs between power consumption of the radios, and their performance in dense wireless environments.This project is important because it addresses an obstacle in scaling wireless sensor nodes -- drastic reductions in the power consumption of wireless communication and innovations in RF energy harvesting may enable new sensor network applications.