InK: Reactive Kernel for Tiny Batteryless Sensors

Tiny energy harvesting battery-free devices promise maintenance free operation for decades, providing swarm scale intelligence in applications from healthcare to building monitoring. These devices operate intermittently because of unpredictable, dynamic energy harvesting environments, failing when energy is scarce. Despite this dynamic operation, current programming models are static; they ignore the event-driven and time-sensitive nature of sensing applications, focusing only on preserving forward progress while maintaining performance. This paper proposes InK; the first reactive kernel that provides a novel way to program these tiny energy harvesting devices that focuses on their main application of event-driven sensing. InK brings an event-driven paradigm shift for batteryless applications, introducing building blocks and abstractions that enable reacting to changes in available energy and variations in sensing data, alongside task scheduling, while maintaining a consistent memory and sense of time. We implemented several event-driven applications for InK, conducted a user study, and benchmarked InK against the state-of-the-art; InK provides up to 14 times more responsiveness and was easier to use. We show that InK enables never before seen batteryless applications, and facilitates more sophisticated batteryless programs.