Abstract
Power-transmission loss can be a severe problem for low-power embedded systems organized in a daisy-chain topology. The loss can be so high that it can result in failure to power the load in the first place. The first contribution of this article is a recursive algorithm for solving the transmission current on each segment of the daisy chain at a given supply voltage. It enables solving not only the transmission loss but also reports infeasible configurations if the voltage is too low. Using this core algorithm, our second contribution is to find energy-efficient configurations that use local energy buffers (LEBs) to eliminate peak load on the bus without relying on high voltage. Experimental results confirm that our proposed techniques significantly reduce the total energy consumption and enable the deployed system to operate for significantly longer. © 2013 ACM.