A Comprehensive Study of Solar Energy Harvesting System in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) incorporate sensor nodes with minimal power consumption. Sensor devices are in high demand in many areas, including smart cities, environmental monitoring, the Internet of Things (IoT), health monitoring, and the like. As nodes are frequently located in remote places, and an ordinary node battery life is too short, energy depletion is a significant problem for the sensor network. But it's not practical to change or regularly maintain the sensor node's battery. This could cause the network to disconnect. Consequently, a recharging sensor node battery has been identified using energy harvesting (EH). It has several environmental forms, including solar, wind, mechanical, etc. The solar system provides unlimited energy resources to nodes. This paper examines a comprehensive case study of solar harvesting systems and their most recent applications. In solar harvesting nodes, the following primary components are utilised: solar panels, energy storage classes, a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$DC-DC$</tex> converter, maximum power point tracking (MPPT), an energy predictor, and a sensing module. Furthermore, we have discussed some recent applications and future work of sensor networks, for example, green street lights, agriculture 4.0, outdoor environment-based monitoring, IIoT, hybrid storage class and new communication technologies.