Abstract-

Technology trends have brought us to a tipping point at which enough energy can be harvested from ambient RF signals (such as TV, cellular) to power low-end devices that sense, compute and communicate. These trends will let us deeply and widely embed computing applications in the physical world, and realize visions such as ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. In this talk, I will describe our progress towards this vision over the past half a dozen years. We begin with work that grows out of passive UHF RFID technology to create a small, inexpensive, and long-lived computing devices that are powered by RFID readers. In particular, I focus on the WISP device, which has multiple sensors and an ultra-low power microcontroller, and harvests its operating power from and communicates sensor data to a standard "Gen2" UHF RFID reader. I will highlight the research challenges in realizing RF-powered computing, such as running with intermittent power and new communication protocols. Most recently, we have begun to run WISP-like devices off of power harvested from TV transmissions with the goal of enabling WISP-like devices to communicate with each other without the need for any special-purpose infrastructure.

This is joint work with Joshua Smith, Shymnath Gollakota, Vamsi Talla, Aaron Parks, Vincent Liu, Alanson Sample, Michael Buettner, Dan Yeager and Ben Greenstein.

Speaker’s biography: Bio: David Wetherall is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He ran Intel’s Seattle research lab on computing systems woven into the fabric of everyday life from 2006 to 2009. Wetherall received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and his B.E. in electrical engineering from the University of Western Australia. His research interests are focused on network systems, especially wireless networks and mobile computing, and Internet measurement and protocol design. He is known for pioneering research on programmable networks, Internet mapping, network de-duplication, and denial-of-service. For this research, he has received the SIGCOMM Test-of-Time award, IEEE Bennett Prize, Sloan Fellowship and NSF CAREER award. For community leadership, he has founded the HotNets workshop, and chaired the SIGCOMM, NSDI, and MobiSys conferences. Wetherall is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and co-author of “Computer Networks.”