A Hardware Compensation Mechanism for Embedded Energy Harvesting Emulation

Energy harvesting is increasingly considered a key technology for the design of autonomous embedded systems. However, the design, deployment and validation of systems exploiting the energy scavenged from the environment to sustain their operativeness, poses considerable research challenges, especially in a networked context. Emulation is regarded as an achievable option to allow reproducible and accurate experimental conditions. However, when the emulation is carried out by means of an embedded low-power device, the tradeoff between accuracy and tight time requirements has to be carefully taken into account in order to avoid performance degradation. We introduce a novel approach that aims at improving the reactiveness of a hardware-software embedded emulator thanks to the introduction of a hardware compensation circuit. The proposed system allows an efficient run-time correction of the emulated voltage to be supplied to the load, thus improving the response time of the emulator with respect to the software-based compensation.