Enabling Failure-resilient Intermittent Systems Without Runtime Checkpointing

Abstract: Self-powered intermittent systems typically adopt runtime checkpointing as a means to accumulate computation progress across power cycles and recover system status from power failures. However, existing approaches based on the checkpointing paradigm normally require system suspension and/or logging at runtime. This paper presents a design which overcomes the drawbacks of checkpointing-based approaches, to enable failure-resilient intermittent systems. Our design allows accumulative execution and instant system recovery under frequent power failures while enforcing the serializability of concurrent task execution to improve computation progress and ensuring data consistency without system suspension during runtime, by leveraging the characteristics of data accessed in hybrid memory. We integrated the design into FreeRTOS running on a Texas Instruments device. Experimental results show that our design can still accumulate progress when the power source is too weak for checkpointing-based approaches to make progress, and improves the computation progress by up to 43% under a relatively strong power source, while reducing the recovery time by at least 90%.