EHDSktch: A Generic Low Power Architecture for Sketching in Energy Harvesting Devices

Energy harvesting devices (EHDs) are becoming extremely prevalent in remote and hazardous environments. They sense the ambient parameters and compute some statistics on them, which are then sent to a remote server. Due to the resource-constrained nature of EHDs, it is challenging to perform exact computations on streaming data; however, if we are willing to tolerate a slight amount of inaccuracy, we can leverage the power of sketching algorithms to provide quick answers with significantly lower energy consumption.In this paper, we propose a novel hardware architecture called EHDSktch – a set of IP blocks that can be used to implement most of the popular sketching algorithms. We demonstrate an energy savings of 4-10X and a speedup of more than 10X over state-ofthe-art software implementations. Leveraging the temporal locality further provides us a performance gain of 3-20% in energy and time and reduces the on-chip memory requirement by at least 50-75%.