Problem Statement

Over the school year of 2023, 2024 we create an open-source testbench for testing and benchmarking wireless batteryless sensor nodes that have been designed by our clients. This test bench is made of modular units to allow test scalability. The units interface with the wireless nodes to collect, record, and store information about their operation and performance.

Project Overview

Batteryless sensor nodes are an emerging technology that enables low-cost, low-maintenance, and long-lifetime embedded sensing. Rather than being wired into a continuous power supply or provisioned with a battery, these sensor nodes survive solely on harvesting energy from ambient sources available in their environment, such as RF signals, solar, vibrational, or thermal. As such they are a challenge to design since these sources are often highly variable and very low power.
A particular challenge Prof. Duwe's group has addressed is dependable communication between nodes. As part of their research they've developed a multi-node testbed for batteryless sensor nodes with a single central constantly-powered "Sniffer" node hooked to a Host workstation. However, experimentation is still very challenging due to the unique energy environment at each node and the complex system design within each node that enables it to survive on miniscule amounts of energy. Our senior design project aims to develop a distributed Sniffer node to enable recording of node-specific information such as incident energy and communication protocol state.

Definitions

Requirements

Functional​

Non-functional​