ECE Colloquium: Life on the Edge: Connecting Everyday Objects with Energy Harvesting and Fog Computing

Realizing the vision of the fully connected world - the Internet of Things (IoT) - requires advances in multiple areas. Energy harvesting and fog/edge computing can bring everyday objects to life in complementary ways: by using the environment to make the IoT nodes smaller and lighter, and by bringing advanced computing capabilities closer to the nodes to make them more adaptive and intelligent.
In this talk I will first describe our Columbia University work on designing and developing Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs), which we envisioned as small, flexible, energetically self-reliant tags that can be attached to objects that are traditionally not networked, such as clothing and produce. I will describe several steps that we took towards realizing this vision: our first-of-their-kind characterizations of the environmental light and motion energy availability for the EnHANTs and for other IoT devices, our energy harvesting adaptive resource allocation algorithms, and our EnHANT prototypes and a first-of-its kind energy-generating EnHANT testbed.
The work covered in this talk appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, and in the proceedings of ACM MobiCom, IEEE INFOCOM, and ACM SIGMETRICS, among others. It was highlighted in several media outlets including the MIT Technology Review and the New Yorker Magazine.