A Little Certainty is All We Need: Discovery and Synchronization Acceleration in Battery-Free IoT

The vision of sustainable IoT constructed from battery-free devices has attracted ample interest in the research community. Yet, efficient device discovery and synchronization - a fundamental problem in IoT systems - remains a critical challenge mainly due to the uncertain ambient energy availability across battery-free devices. We argue that bringing in a small level of certainty is necessary for facilitating communication in battery-free IoT. We propose Pulsar where we introduce a small number of battery-powered devices, serving as the communication coordinator for a large number of battery-free devices. We develop two communication schemes, namely one-to-one, and all-to-all, for Pulsar. Our results based on simulations and prototype-based experiments show that Pulsar achieves consistently good performance across different scenarios while requiring no special hardware or environmental conditions.