Design and implementation of ambiently powered Internet of Things-That-Think with asynchronous inferenceDesign and implementation of ambiently powered Internet of Things-That-Think with asynchronous inference Peer-Reviewed Journal Publication Δημοσίευση σε Περιοδικό με Κριτές 2025-04-252023enThis work offers design and implementation of in-network inference, using message passing among ambiently powered wireless sensor network (WSN) terminals. The stochastic nature of ambient energy harvesting dictates intermittent operation of each WSN terminal and as such, the message passing inference algorithms should be robust to asynchronous operation. It is shown, perhaps for the first time in the literature (to the best of our knowledge), a proof of concept, where a WSN harvests energy from the environment and processes itself the collected information in a distributed manner, by converting the (network) inference task to a probabilistic, in-network message passing problem, often at the expense of increased total delay. Examples from Gaussian belief propagation and average consensus (AC) are provided, along with the derivation of a statistical convergence metric for the latter case. A k-means method is offered that maps the elements of the calculated vector to the different WSN terminals and overall execution delay (in number of iterations) is quantified. Interestingly, it is shown that there are divergent instances of the in-network message passing algorithms that become convergent, under asynchronous operation. Ambient solar energy harvesting availability is also studied, controlling the probability of successful (or not) message passing. Hopefully, this work will spark further interest for asynchronous message passing algorithms and technologies that enable in-network inference, toward ambiently powered, batteryless Internet of Things-That-Think.This work was supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) through the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty Members and Researchers and the Procurement of High-Cost Research Equipment” under Project 2846. This article was presented in part at 5th IEEE International Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking in Extreme Environments (WCNEE), International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), Pafos, Cyprus, July 2021, pp. 458–465 [DOI: 10.1109/DCOSS52077.2021.00077]. (Vasileios Papageorgiou, Athanasios Nichoritis, and Panagiotis Vasilakopoulos contributed equally to this work.) (Corresponding author: Aggelos Bletsas.)http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/IEEE Internet of Things Journal101715283-15300 Papageorgiou Vasileios Παπαγεωργιου Βασιλειος Nichoritis Athanasios Νηχωριτης Αθανασιος Vasilakopoulos Panagiotis Βασιλακοπουλος Παναγιωτης Vougioukas Georgios Βουγιουκας Γεωργιος Bletsas Aggelos Μπλετσας Αγγελος Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Distributed signal processing Energy harvesting In situ processing Low-cost sensors and device Resourceconstrained networks