Renewable energy harvesting schemes in wireless sensor networks: A Survey

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are emerging as they demands for various applications, for example, military surveillance, home automation, vehicle tracking, environmental monitoring, wildlife tracking, health monitoring, and scientific exploration. Usually, sensor nodes operate with limited battery capacity. Using conventional batteries, it is not always efficient to design long-lasting sensor networks. Moreover, the replacement of the batteries is too challenging to operate in harsh environmental conditions. Therefore, to overcome, one such technique is to recharge the battery of sensor nodes using an energy harvesting system. On the other hand, some of the existing energy harvesting WSNs still lacking the intelligent strategy for judiciously utilizing both the energy management and harvesting system. The review work we present is categorized into energy management and renewable energy harvesting techniques. In energy management techniques, we discuss various methods to save energy consumption of the energy harvesting sensor networks. Notably, we study their protocol design strategies for energy-saving and essential strategies such as prediction for maximizing the energy harvesting of the sensor nodes. We also summarize their shortcomings and ability to deal with the energy harvesting system. In renewable energy harvesting schemes, we present various energy harvesting mechanisms such as solar, wind and others. We also discuss the different energy harvesting mechanisms, especially their protocol design strategies for maximizing energy harvesting, and summarize their merits and demerits. The work also discusses various challenging issues for energy harvesting WSNs followed by future research directions, and some recent applications.