Abstract
Wireless sensor nodes are traditionally powered by individual batteries, and a significant effort has been devoted to maximizing the lifetime of these devices. However, as the batteries can only store a finite amount of energy, the network is still doomed to die, and changing the batteries is not always possible. A promising solution is to enable each node to harvest energy directly in its environment, using individual energy harvesters. Moreover, novel ultra-low power wake-up receivers, which allow continuous listening of the channel with negligible power consumption, are emerging. These devices enable asynchronous communication, further reducing the power consumption related to communication, which is typically one the most energy-consuming tasks in wireless sensor networks. Energy harvesting and wake-up receivers can be combined to significantly increase the energy efficiency of sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an energy manager for energy harvesting wireless sensor nodes and an asynchronous medium access control protocol, which exploits ultra-low power wake-up receivers. The two components are designed to work together and especially to fit the stringent constraints of wireless sensor nodes. The proposed approach has been implemented on a real hardware platform and tested in the field. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach in terms of energy efficiency, power consumption and throughput, which can be up to more than two-times higher compared to traditional schemes.
Highlights
Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) are today a mature technology enabling a large variety of cyber-physical system applications in environmental monitoring, healthcare, security and industrial domains
Our scheme is evaluated under variable energy harvesting conditions to show the benefits of the Energy Management (EM) in collaboration with the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols and the higher performance of the proposed approach
An energy manager combined with an asynchronous MAC protocol has been proposed for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks
Summary
Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) are today a mature technology enabling a large variety of cyber-physical system applications in environmental monitoring, healthcare, security and industrial domains. A wireless sensor node is made of several components: a processing unit, memory, sensors, a transceiver and an energy source [1] These devices are battery-powered and have a limited lifetime, making energy one of the most precious resources, especially in scenarios where the network is expected to work for several months or even years. To tackle this problem, a successful approach is Energy Harvesting (EH), which allows the nodes to be powered by environmental energy sources such as sunlight, wind, vibration, water flow, etc. Using EH, it is possible to increase the WSN lifetime by an order of magnitude with respect to traditional battery-powered approaches and to achieve the Energy Neutral Operation (ENO) state, i.e., the amount of harvested energy is greater than or equal to the amount of consumed energy over long
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