Simba: A Unified Framework to Explore and Facilitate the Design of Battery-Free Systems

Battery-free sensing devices have gained growing popularity as they can operate relying solely on harvested energy and environmentally friendly capacitors. However, despite the increasing number of battery-free solutions, their design remains a difficult task. In fact, the limited energy storage capacity and the resulting coupling between energy supply and demand introduce new design trade-offs that cannot be explored using conventional tools that consider a constant power supply. To enable fast design space exploration and facilitate the development of battery-free systems, we introduce Simba, an open-source simulation framework that allows to investigate in detail the complex interplay between various device components. We demonstrate the benefits of Simba in two case studies, evaluated experimentally, targeting real-world, state-of-the-art battery-free devices. First, we illustrate how Simba can explore the dependencies between different component configurations and assess their impact on the overall system performance. Among others, we show that changing the storage capacity or slightly modifying the load behavior can improve data throughput by a factor of up to 5.1x and 9.7x, respectively. Second, we present how Simba allows to automatically select key parameters that optimize the operations of a battery-free system (e.g., its checkpointing mechanism), and showcase how Simba enables performance evaluations based on real-world energy harvesting traces.CCS CONCEPTS• Computer systems organization → Embedded systems.