CapOS: Capacitor Error Resilience for Energy Harvesting Systems

Energy harvesting systems have emerged as an alternative to battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To deal with frequent power outages in the absence of battery, energy harvesting systems rely on a capacitor-backed checkpoint mechanism also known as just-in-time (JIT) checkpointing. It checkpoints volatile data in nonvolatile memory (NVM) just before a power outage occurs—using the energy buffered in the capacitor—and restores the checkpointed data from NVM in the wake of the outage. While the JIT checkpointing gives an illusion that volatile data survive a power outage as if they were nonvolatile, it turns out that due to capacitor degradation, energy harvesting systems can unexpectedly fail the JIT checkpointing, losing or corrupting data across the outage. To address the problem, this article presents an operating system-driven solution called CapOS. At a high level, CapOS diagnoses the capacitor in a reactive yet safe manner. When the JIT checkpoint failure occurs, CapOS detects the capacitor degradation without causing the data corruption. To recover from such a capacitor error, CapOS electrically isolates the degraded capacitor—so that it restores its original capacitance by itself with the help of capacitor’s resilient nature—and disables the JIT checkpointing. In case, power outages occur during the capacitor isolation, CapOS leverages undo logging with interval-based checkpointing for their recovery. Once the capacitor is fully recovered, CapOS gets back to the capacitor-based JIT checkpointing. The experimental results demonstrate that CapOS can effectively address the capacitor error of energy harvesting systems at a low run-time cost, without compromising the recovery of power outages.