An Efficient EH-WSN Energy Management Mechanism

Abstract

An Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Network (EH-WSN) depends on harvesting energy from the environment to prolong network lifetime. Subjected to limited energy in complex environments, an EH-WSN encounters difficulty when applied to real environments as the network efficiency is reduced. Existing EH-WSN studies are usually conducted in assumed conditions in which nodes are synchronized and the energy profile is knowable or calculable. In real environments, nodes may lose their synchronization due to lack of energy. Furthermore, energy harvesting is significantly affected by multiple factors, whereas the ideal hypothesis is difficult to achieve in reality. In this paper, we introduce a general Intermittent Energy-Aware (IEA) EH-WSN platform. For the first time, we adopted a double-stage capacitor structure to ensure node synchronization in situations without energy harvesting, and we used an integrator to achieve ultra-low power measurement. With regard to hardware and software, we provided an optimized energy management mechanism for intermittent functioning. This paper describes the overall design of the IEA platform, and elaborates the energy management mechanism from the aspects of energy management, energy measurement, and energy prediction. In addition, we achieved node synchronization in different time and energy environments, measured the energy in reality, and proposed the light weight energy calculation method based on measured solar energy. In real environments, experiments are performed to verify the high performance of IEA in terms of validity and reliability. The IEA platform is shown to have ultra-low power consumption and high accuracy for energy measurement and prediction.