Early Scavenger Dimensioning in Wireless Industrial Monitoring Applications

Abstract

The Industrial Internet era is pushing for even more miniaturized, powerful and energy efficient devices that seamlessly integrate to the Internet and aim to improve efficiency of industries by monitoring, actuating or sampling data from machines, infrastructures and systems. Industrial low power wireless protocols are one of the key enablers of that revolution but still energy consumption is what is limiting ubiquitous deployments of perpetual and unattended devices. The adoption of energy harvesting technologies is enabling autonomously powered control and monitoring systems on Industries, Infrastructures and Cities. Yet putting these systems together require a clear understanding of their capabilities and behavior in order to dimension their energy needs and to contribute to the development of a new generation of self-powered ubiquitous devices. Therefore, this article discusses, through a use case, the trade-off to reliably dimension scavenger properties to network requirements and application needs, with the main objective to enable Industries to optimize the adoption of that technologies while keeping low technical risks.Index Terms-Low-power modelling, industrial wireless, energy scavenging, self-powered wireless sensor networks. I. INTRODUCTIONI NDUSTRIES are shifting to the use of wireless sensing and actuating technologies to improve their productivity, energy efficiency, and/or to develop new products and services [1]. In this shift, a key enabler is the development of a new generation of wireless devices that consume less energy, which is being driven by new microcontrollers, new radio technologies, new communication standards [2], [3] and enhancements to sensing and actuating peripherals. These features, added to the ability to seamlessly communicate over the Internet [4], boosted the possibility to gather an unprecedented amount of data, and lead to the emergence of numerous sensing and actuation applications [5] [6]. Clear examples are the emergence of the industry of wearable devices for health applications [7], smart cities pervasive instrumentalization [8] or the improvement of actuation and monitoring systems in the oil and gas industries.However, making more energy efficient technologies is still far from having those envisaged ubiquitous deployments (so called the Internet of Things [9] [10]), which will enable B. Martinez is with Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain and Worldsensing,

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