An Efficient Renewable Energy Management and Sharing System for Sustainable Embedded Devices

Ting Zhu,Chang Zhou

doi:10.1155/2012/185959

Ting Zhu, Chang Zhou

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/185959

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Abstract

We present the design and evaluation of a capacitor-driven efficient renewable energy management and sharing system, called REMS system, that is designed to replace battery-based energy storage units. We first identify potential applications and requirements of the REMS system. Then we describe the design of REMS system which aims at minimizing the energy leaked away and providing accurate and fine-grained energy sharing between embedded devices. We extensively evaluate our system under different real-world settings. Results indicate that our charging and discharging control can effectively minimize the energy leaked away. Moreover, the energy sharing design can efficiently share renewable energy among multiple devices and significantly extend the lifetime of a system.

Highlights

With the increasing need for ubiquitous computing, embedded devices are heavily involved in a lot of applications such as data collection [1, 2], weather condition monitoring [3], road service monitoring [4], online game [5], VoIP service [6], mobile payment [7], and social activities [8]
The results indicate that our system can effectively minimize the energy leaked away and provide accurate and efficient energy sharing among multiple systems
We call this approach the efficient control (EC), which is compared with the following baseline

Summary

Introduction

With the increasing need for ubiquitous computing, embedded devices are heavily involved in a lot of applications such as data collection [1, 2], weather condition monitoring [3], road service monitoring [4], online game [5], VoIP service [6], mobile payment [7], and social activities [8]. Due to the mobility requirement, embedded devices are normally equipped with limited and rechargeable energy storage units, such as rechargeable batteries. Ultracapacitors possess a set of advantages: they (i) have high charge efficiency (i.e., more than 90%); (ii) have more than 1 million recharge cycles which translates to a lifetime of more than 10 years; (iii) can be charged very fast; (iv) are made from carbon nanotubes which does not have toxic-waste-disposal problems when the capacitors reach the end of their lifetime. (i) To our knowledge, energy sharing is a new concept that can effectively utilize the limited energy and improve the performance of multiple embedded devices as a whole. Our design affords simultaneous energy sharing among multiple embedded devices.

Motivation

50 F 33 F

System Overview

Hardware Layer

Control Layer

Network Layer

Implementation and Evaluation

Simulation

Related Work

10. Conclusion