Significance of Energy Harvesting for Wireless Sensor Networks

MDPI Electronics, 2021

Wireless sensor network nodes and mobile devices are normally powered by batteries that, when depleted, must be recharged or replaced. This poses important problems, in particular for sensor nodes that are placed in inaccessible areas or biomedical sensors implanted in the human body where the battery replacement is very impractical. Moreover, the depleted battery must be properly disposed of in accordance with national and international regulations to prevent envi-ronmental pollution. A very interesting alternative to power mobile devices is energy harvesting where energy sources naturally present in the environment (such as sunlight, thermal gradients and vibrations) are scavenged to provide the power supply for sensor nodes and mobile systems. Since the presence of these energy sources is discontinuous in nature, electronic systems powered by energy harvesting must include a power management system and a storage device to store the scavenged energy. In this paper, the main strategies to design a wireless mobile sensor system powered by energy harvesting are reviewed and different sensor systems powered by such energy sources are presented.

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

The usefulness of wireless sensor networks has fascinated the world’s attention. Usage of low-power microcontrollers and wireless sensors to handle real-world problems such as environmental, medicinal, and structural monitoring has exploded. Wireless sensor nodes are extremely tiny and are designed for low-duty applications such as recording physical characteristics. Wireless sensor network operations such as sensing, calculations, and communication take extensively more energy than these low-powered sensor nodes. They are used both in attainable and inaccessible areas and are usually powered by batteries. Since the sensor is powered by batteries, replacing and charging the battery after its depletion are challenging. Manual battery replacement is hampered by geographical restrictions, which results in significant reduction of wireless sensor network performance and longevity. As a result, this study addresses the energy-constrained wireless sensor networks by creating a technologic...

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2014

As the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) technology has great advancement, small and smart WSN systems now can be used for more complicated and challenging applications. WSNs investigation has primarily believed the use of a convenient and inadequate energy source for empowering the sensors. A sensor becomes useless in the absence of energy and becomes unable to contribute to the utility of the network as a group. Therefore, extensive efforts have been used in finding energy-efficient networking protocols for increasing the life span of WSNs. However, there are promising WSN applications where the sensors are obligatory to work for a long time after their deployments. In these cases, batteries are tough or impractical to replace/recharge. Although, a little amount of power is required for these applications, the useable lifetime of WSNs is decreased by the gradual degradation of the batteries. With the motivation of raising the usable WSNs around us and to value a number of economic and environmental limitations, researchers are looking for new green and theoretically unlimited energy sources. Harvesting of energy from the ambient energy is the basement of these new sources. Energy harvesting devices efficiently and effectively capture, accumulate, store, condition, and manage this energy and supply it in a form that can be used to empower WSNs. This harvested energy can be an alternative energy source for adding-on a principal power source and thus increase the consistency of the whole WSN by preventing the disruption of power. A great deal of research has been reviewed and specific ranges of applications have been found. Though there are challenges to overcome, different researchers have taken different approaches to solve those. In this review, we have emphasized on different scopes, challenges, ideas and actions of energy harvesting for WSNs.

2012

This work is the culmination of a yearlong group project in the Masters of Engineering program at UC Berkeley. I could not have done it without the contributions and support of my fellow team members: Ankur Aggarwal, Ameer Ellaboudy, Ryan Moore, and David Stanislowshi. Thank you for all the great and fun times we had working together on this project.

E3S Web of Conferences, 2022

Wireless Sensor Network is an emerging technology that has the potential to be used in futuristic applications. Sensor nodes are energy-constrained. They rely on batteries with limited capacity which impact their lifetime or mobility. To address this problem, energy harvesting technology is a solution that aims to avoid the premature energy depletion of nodes. It recharges their batteries using an energy harvesting system from the environment. In this review work, we present the concept of energy harvesting technology (EH) and Energy-Harvesting for Wireless Sensor Network (EH-WSN). We then discuss many schemes in the literature to save energy consumption of the energy harvesting sensor networks. We study their protocol design strategies and working principals. We also summarize their merits, demerits along with some future research directions.

Metrology and Measurement Systems, 2016

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have existed for many years and had assimilated many interesting innovations. Advances in electronics, radio transceivers, processes of IC manufacturing and development of algorithms for operation of such networks now enable creating energy-efficient devices that provide practical levels of performance and a sufficient number of features. Environmental monitoring is one of the areas in which WSNs can be successfully used. At the same time this is a field where devices must either bring their own power reservoir, such as a battery, or scavenge energy locally from some natural phenomena. Improving the efficiency of energy harvesting methods reduces complexity of WSN structures. This survey is based on practical examples from the real world and provides an overview of state-of-the-art methods and techniques that are used to create energyefficient WSNs with energy harvesting.

ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are crucial in supporting continuous environmental monitoring, where sensor nodes are deployed and must remain operational to collect and transfer data from the environment to a base-station. However, sensor nodes have limited energy in their primary power storage unit, and this energy may be quickly drained if the sensor node remains operational over long periods of time. Therefore, the idea of harvesting ambient energy from the immediate surroundings of the deployed sensors, to recharge the batteries and to directly power the sensor nodes, has recently been proposed. The deployment of energy harvesting in environmental field systems eliminates the dependency of sensor nodes on battery power, drastically reducing the maintenance costs required to replace batteries. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art in energy-harvesting WSNs for environmental monitoring applications, including Animal Tracking, Air Quality Monitoring, Water Quality Monito...

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 2018

Wireless Sensor Networks assume an imperative part to monitor and gather information from complex geological ranges. Energy conservation plays a fundamental role in WSNs since such sensor networks are designed to be located in dangerous and non-accessible areas and has gained popularity since the last decade. The main issue of Wireless Sensor Network is energy consumption. Therefore, management of energy consumption of the sensor node is the main area of our research. Sensor nodes use non-changeable batteries for power supply and the lifetime of Sensor node greatly depends on these batteries. The replacement of these batteries is very difficult in many applications, such as an alternative solution to this problem is to use Energy Harvesting system in Wireless Sensor Network to provide a permanent power supply to sensor nodes. This process of extracting energies from nature and converting it into electrical energy is called energy harvesting. Energy can be harvested from the environment for sensor nodes. There are many sources of energies in nature like solar, wind and thermal which can be harvested and used for WSNs. In this research, we suggest to use energy harvesting system for Cluster Heads in a clustering based Wireless Sensor Networks. We will compare our proposed technique to a well-known clustering algorithm Low Energy Adaptive Cluster Hierarchy (LEACH).

— Wireless Sensor Network are in great demand from the recent years, as nowadays we have seen a wide growth of wireless devices including cellular phones, laptops, mobiles, PDA's etc. Wireless Sensor Networks consists of thousands of tiny sensor nodes. In a wireless sensor network a node is no longer useful when its battery dies, so to avoid this problem many protocols were introduced but most of the rank is given to hierarchical routing protocols. WSN needs the security mechanism which efficiently works with high security methods which provide the proper authorization of nodes in the network to avoid malicious activities and provide the better performance of the ad-hoc network. To provide the better security and energy efficiency this paper presents a survey on energy harvesting mechanism and security features of WSN.

Springer Series on Chemical Sensors and Biosensors, 2012

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are set to form a significant part of the new pervasive Internet, often referred to as the Internet of Things. WSNs have traditionally been powered by limited energy sources, viz. batteries, limiting their operational lifetime. To ensure the sustainability of WSNs, researchers have turned to alternative energy sources for power. Harvesting ambient energy from the environment to power WSNs is a promising approach but it is currently unable to provide a sustained energy supply to support continuous operation. Sensor nodes therefore need to exploit the sporadic availability of energy to quickly sense and transmit the data. We first review the recent developments in energy harvesting technology and research on networking protocol design for Wireless Sensor Networks Powered by Ambient Energy Harvesting. Then, we discuss some of the challenges faced by researchers in designing networking protocols and summarize the open research problems.