Prototyping Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (Enhants)

This paper focuses on a new type of wireless devices in the domain between RFIDs and sensor networks Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs). Future EnHANTs will be small, flexible, and self-powered devices that can be attached to objects that are traditionally not networked (e. g., books, toys, clothing), thereby providing the infrastructure for novel tracking applications. We present the design considerations for the EnHANT prototypes, developed over the past 3 years. The prototypes harvest indoor light energy using custom organic solar cells, communicate and form multihop networks using ultra-low-power Ultra-Wideband Impulse Radio (UWB-IR) transceivers, and adapt their communications and networking patterns to the energy harvesting and battery states. We also describe a small scale EnHANTs testbed that uniquely allows evaluating different algorithms with trace-based light energy inputs.