Design and analysis of micro-solar power systems for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks are fundamentally limited by their energy storage resources and the power they obtain from their environment. Several micro-solar powered designs have been developed to address this important problem but little analysis is available on key design trade-offs. We provide an empirical and mathematical analysis of two leading competitors (Heliomote and Trio) and develop a taxonomy of the micro-solar design space, identify key components, design choices, interactions, difficulties and trade-offs.

Harvested Energy Scavenging and Transfer capabilities in Opportunistic Ring Routing

“…As we are dealing with opportunistic node connections, so we have devised a mechanism for updating PC values after every round of communication. The PC value is updated after comparing it with the previous PC values and selecting the maximum PC value among them, thus improving the efficiency of finding an optimal path as indicated by (25) and (26). The energy transfer based opportunistic routing process is summarized in Algorithm 3.…”

“…The deployment of solar harvesting depends on the type of application. Various examples of solar energy harvesting utilizing harvest-storeutilize architecture are: indoor router node, micro-scale indoor light energy harvesting system, battery less solar harvester, hydro watch and heliomote [23][24][25][26]. Another method for energy harvesting is RF-based energy harvesting in which radio waves are converted into DC power by utilizing single-stage or multi-stage approaches.…”

“…The high-voltage DC signal at PMIC can be used to power the communication unit, micro-controller and sensor measurement units of WSN node. Since the power generated by the harvester can reach very low levels, it should be ensured that the PMIC operates with a high efficiency [23][24][25][26]. The DC-DC converter used in this design is boost converter which increases the amplitude of harvested energy by using capacitors, inductors and switch.…”

Solar-Powered Wireless Sensor Network’s Energy Gathering Technology

“…The structure of solar energy gathering node used in wireless sensor networks is as shown in Fig. 1 [5][6]. It is constituted by four modules, the solar energy gathering module, energy management module, energy storage module and energy consumption module.…”