Chapter 6 - Energy Harvesting for Sustainable Smart Spaces

Abstract

Abstract Energy sustainability is a challenge in making smart spaces truly pervasive. Renewable energy technologies have become a promising solution to reduce energy concerns that arise due to limited battery in wireless sensor networks, the backbone of many smart spaces. While this enables us to prolong the lifetime of a wireless sensor network (perpetually), the realization of such sustainable micro-scale energy harvesting system is challenging due to the unstable nature of environmental energy sources and demanding requirements of applications. In this chapter, we show the model of micro-scale energy harvesting system and research efforts both in designing low-power efficient hardware platforms and in creating software components to operate micro-scale energy harvesting systems at their maximum potentials. We highlight the need of deployment study of micro-scale energy harvesting systems in addition to designing and operating research and propose middleware architecture for a unified structured way to optimize energy harvesting system performance.