The EnHANTs project received a $1.2M NSF Grant

Professors Rubenstein, Kinget, Kymissis, Wang, and Zussman received a $1.2M grant from the Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The team aims to develop Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs) which are thin and flexible tags of a few square centimeters that can be attached to everyday objects, such as clothing, furniture, walls, books, toys, and other household and office items. The tags will harvest energy available in the environment such as light or vibration energy. The tags would be able to communicate with each other over short distances to form wireless networks.

EnHANTs will enable networking virtually every object around us and will allow expanding the 'Internet of Things' to include everyday objects that are traditionally not networked. Novel applications, not available with today's technologies, include lost item recovery, object tracking, disaster recovery, and emergency alerts.

The project takes an interdisciplinary approach to address the severe energy constraints imposed by using harvested energy alone. In particular, the team combines expertise in networking, communications, low-power electronics, and organic energy-harvesting devices to make the efficiency improvements of several orders of magnitude that are required for the realization of EnHANTs. New flexible organic energy harvesting and storage devices will be combined with energy management electronics; ultra low power pulse-based wideband wireless communications will be combined with novel pulse communication techniques for ultra-low power wireless connectivity; and, novel networking paradigms will start from and energy-driven approach to provide ad-hoc networking and interfaces with traditional networks and computing devices. A test platform of networked tags will be deployed and tested demonstrating the energy harvesting, communication, and networking components developed using custom hardware.

For more details see http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0964497

Mobicom 2009 Paper

A paper on the networking aspects of EnHANTs, titled “Challenge: Ultra-Low-Power Energy-Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs)”, will appear in the 2009 ACM MOBICOM conference  (acceptance ratio ~10%).

First Prize in the Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Projects competition

The EnHANTs team wins the first prize in the Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Projects competition.

Professors Gil Zussman, Peter Kinget, John Kymissis, Dan Rubenstein, and Xiaodong Wang, won the first prize in the Vodafone America Foundation's "Wireless Innovation Project" competition, which had nearly 100 university and non-profit applicants. The competition identifies and funds unique innovations using wireless related technology offering the best potential to address critical social issues around the world. The Columbia team will use the associated funding to support their project, "Active Networked Tags for Disaster Recovery Applications". The project focuses on developing a system that uses wireless devices to track and locate survivors trapped by fires and structural collapse. The system is based on energy harvesting tags using ultra low power communications. The project draws upon the team's diverse research expertise in energy harvesting materials and devices, ultra low power electronics, wireless communications, and networking.
For additional details, please see the Wireless Innovation Project’s website and the press release.

Google Research Award

Professors John Kymissis, Peter Kinget, Dan Rubenstein, and Gil Zussman received a Google Research award for their project "Self-Powered, Networked Tags for Active Tracking of Physical Objects". The objective of the project is to design hardware, algorithms, and software to enable active tracking of physical objects using small self-powered, networked tags. This interdisciplinary project will build on the team's expertise in energy-harvesting devices and techniques, ultra-low power integrated circuits, and energy efficient networking protocols to develop a solution that takes advantage of cross-layer design optimizations. The integrated solution will enable a variety of tracking and monitoring applications beyond what RFID and other localization and identification technologies permit.