Optimizing energy consumption in cyber physical systems using multiple operating modes

Energy consumption has been considered as an important optimization metric in developing Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). In addition to considering the minimal power consumption in the design cycle, the effective management of power consumption during operation of the system is also a key for reducing the overall energy budget. In this paper, we target at improving energy consumption of CPS using multiple operating modes. Our target CPS architecture consists of a set of sensor and actuator modules, a communication network, and a computation and control unit. The components in the system have multiple operating modes such as active mode, idle mode, and some low power operating modes. If a component has not been used for a certain time period, the component is placed into lower operating modes gradually. Once a sensor detects an activity, all the components go to an active operating mode and the system responds to the environmental change. In order to show the viability of the proposed technique, we conduct some experiments in various environmental setups. The experimental evaluation shows around 33% energy gain compared to the systems that does not have any low power operating modes.