Integrated software-hardware design for ultra-low power infrastructure monitoring

Ultra-low power communication and computing are of critical importance to the development of an infrastructure monitoring system, which is expected to have a very long life cycle under the constraints of extremely limited battery capacity or small energy scavenging devices. This paper discusses the enabling technologies for ultra-low power infrastructure monitoring, and includes a survey on existing ultra-low power infrastructure monitoring technologies. The survey covers both ultra-low power wireless communication technologies, which are usually developed in the form of software, such as protocols and algorithms, and ultra-low power digital hardware design techniques. Traditionally, the communication protocols and hardware are designed in isolation. The isolated design approach fails to capture the interaction between software and hardware or the fundamental tradeoff between communication and computing. We propose a new integrated software-hardware design approach to unify the development process of communication software and hardware. Several new integrated design methods are proposed, and they have the potential to lead to new ultra-low power technologies with power efficiency far beyond existing technologies.