Rethinking Power Efficiency for Next-Generation Processor-Free Sensing Devices

Abstract

The last decade has seen significant advances in power optimization for IoT sensors. The conventional wisdom considers that if we reduce the power consumption of each component (e.g., processor, radio) into μW-level of power, the IoT sensors could achieve overall ultra-low power consumption. However, we show that this conventional wisdom is overturned, as bus communication can take significant power for exchanging data between each component. In this paper, we analyze the power efficiency of bus communication and ask whether it is possible to reduce the power consumption for bus communication. We observe that existing bus architectures in mainstream IoT devices can be classified into either push-pull or open-drain architecture. push-pull only adapts to unidirectional communication, whereas open-drain inherently fits for bidirectional communication which benefits simplifying bus topology and reducing hardware costs. However, open-drain consumes more power than push-pull due to the high leakage current consumption while communicating on the bus. We present Turbo, a novel approach introducing low power to the open-drain based buses by reducing the leakage current created on the bus. We instantiate Turbo on I2C bus and evaluate it with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors. The results show a 76.9% improvement in power efficiency in I2C communication.