Designing sustainable Wireless sensor networks with efficient energy harvesting systems

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are resource-constrained devices. Especially energy is scarce. Recent advances with energy harvesting system (EHS) technology now offer new opportunities for long-lived WSNs. Several prototypes of EHS-enhanced WSN platforms have recently been designed in a low-power and power-efficient way. While the field starts to mature there are still a few lessons to be learned for building low-cost and robust systems. Especially, perpetual systems pose new constraints that have not yet been formalized in well-established metrics. Several studies exist, that try to tune systems and algorithms offline for being able to cope with different situations that might occur. The prediction of solar traces is a well-known example for EHS-enhanced WSNs. However, it is a cumbersome task trying to be prepared for all possible extreme conditions especially when prediction is needed. Therefore, we introduce RiverMote which is a low-cost highly efficient design with extended black-out sustainability (BOS) capabilities. We suggest to put special focus on BOS as a mechanism that can even react to hard-to-model events in a general way without the need to rely on error-prone prediction mechanisms. RiverMote is a low-cost WSN platform with integrated EHS. It outperforms state-of-the-art EHS technology efficiency for WSNs and supports BOS of more than three weeks.