No abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are employed today in many application areas, ranging from health and lifestyle to automotive, smart building, predictive maintenance, active RFID tags. The commercially available sensor nodes are battery-driven devices. As days proceed, the batteries used in the nodes losses their charge and subsequently get isolated from the network. Energy harvesting and management is the most convenient ways to solve the problem of making WSN autonomous and enable widespread use of these systems in many applications. Out of various energy sources, solar radiation energy is available everywhere and fulfil the power requirement of WSN. Thus, a solar energy harvester for low powered wireless sensor networks is proposed. In this paper, a solar energy harvester which composed of a solar panel and energy harvesting module is introduced. This scheme works on the principle of photo voltaic effect. Harvested energy is used to charge the EnerChip batteries in the EH module, which is used to communicate the integrated temperature and RF signal strength information of environment at end point or WSN to the access point.