Self-Sustainable Cyber-Physical Systems with Collaborative Intermittent Computing

Cyber-physical systems have become a main technology driver for our intelligent society. However, almost all cyber-physical systems rely on battery-powered devices to function, which suffer from high maintenance cost for recharging/replacing the batteries and bring in negative environmental impacts due to the hazardous chemicals used in the batteries. To address this challenge, a new computing paradigm called intermittent computing (IC) was proposed which advocates a battery-free design where cyber-physical devices can be completely powered by energy scavenged from ambient sources such as sunlight, radio waves, and vibrations. Since its advent, many efforts have been made on addressing the challenges in IC, from the hardware to the software stack. In this vision paper, we make a brief summary of existing works on IC and discuss a more realistic setup where, instead of focusing on one IC node as done in most existing works, we propose to build a self-sustainable cyber-physical system through the collaboration of distributed IC devices-collaborative intermittent computing (CIC). We discuss the challenges in CIC and provide a vision for the future cyber-physical systems.