A smart energy management power supply unit for low-power IoT systems

Abstract

A lot of research has been contributed towards smart energy harvesting, efficient energy management and energy storage/supply capabilities, as they are considered a major bottleneck in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Similarly, there is an extreme interest to design new algorithms and protocols regarding energy harvesting prediction, load's energy consuming profiling, etc. Although those techniques improve energy efficiency, it still remains to solve the fundamental problem of energy provisioning in a more practical, real-life manner, as the majority of the hardware solutions choose to produce simple and robust implementations. In this paper, we present a smart energy management platform for low-power IoT systems that implements both energy harvesting and storage technologies but dynamically sets different power modes based on online monitoring measurements and energy harvesting prediction. With respect to power specifications our solution succeeds to both supply and inform the load system for future energy provisioning capability. Thus, our prototype can be characterised as a load agnostic device w.r.t. specification values, that can adjust to different conditions and use cases towards an effective system energy provisioning.