Most existing simulators for WSNs (wireless sensor networks) model battery-powered sensors and provide MAC and routing protocols designed for battery-powered WSNs. Recently, however, increasingly extensive studies of energy harvesting sensor systems require the development of appropriate simulators, but there are few related studies on such simulators. Unlike existing simulators, simulators for energy harvesting WSNs require a new energy model that is integrated with the energy harvesting, rechargeable battery, and energy consuming models. Additionally, the new model must enable applications of the well-known MAC and routing protocols designed for energy harvesting WSNs and have a convenient user-friendly interface. In this work, we design and implement a user-friendly simulator for solar energy harvesting WSNs.

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A number of studies have been actively conducted to address limited energy resources in sensor systems over wireless sensor networks. Most of these studies are based on energy-aware schemes, which take advantage of the residual energy from the sensor system's own or neighboring nodes. However, existing sensor systems estimate residual energy based solely on voltage and current consumption, leading to inaccurate estimations because the residual energy in real batteries is affected by temperature and load. This misinformation makes a complete nonsense of existing energy-aware research, which is not allowed in reliable WSN applications. In this study, therefore, an efficient residual-energy estimation scheme is proposed in consideration of not only the voltage but also the temperature and load characteristics of batteries. The performance of the proposed scheme was verified through an experiment and simulations in the actual environment, and its effect gets more notable when the scale of the WSN goes larger.

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