Wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring powered by microprocessors heat dissipation

Abstract

We present an energy harvesting solution for a wireless sensor network for indoor environmental monitoring in data centers. The energy that supplies the nodes is harvested from the heat generated by the server microprocessors using Thermo Electric Generators (TEG), which convert a temperature gradient into electrical energy. We present a performance comparison between two commercial TEGs under different server processor load profiles. We focus our attention on server boards based on ARM CPUs (Arndale with ARM Cortex A15 and Pandaboard with ARM Cortex A9), supplying nodes equipped with gas sensors. From our results and simulations, we are able to demonstrate the possibility of powering a perpetual environmental monitoring WSN with a 0.0027% duty-cycle with the energy scavenged from computationally intensive embedded platform.