Research in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks and the Challenges Ahead (original) (raw)
Related papers
Wireless sensor networks powered by ambient energy harvesting (WSN-HEAP)-Survey and challenges
… Technology, Information Theory …, 2009
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) research has predominantly assumed the use of a portable and limited energy source, viz. batteries, to power sensors. Without energy, a sensor is essentially useless and cannot contribute to the utility of the network as a whole. Consequently, substantial research efforts have been spent on designing energy-efficient networking protocols to maximize the lifetime of WSNs. However, there are emerging WSN applications where sensors are required to operate for much longer durations (like years or even decades) after they are deployed. Examples include in-situ environmental/habitat monitoring and structural health monitoring of critical infrastructures and buildings, where batteries are hard (or impossible) to replace/recharge. Lately, an alternative to powering WSNs is being actively studied, which is to convert the ambient energy from the environment into electricity to power the sensor nodes. While renewable energy technology is not new (e.g., solar and wind) the systems in use are far too large for WSNs. Those small enough for use in wireless sensors are most likely able to provide only enough energy to power sensors sporadically and not continuously. Sensor nodes need to exploit the sporadic availability of energy to quickly sense and transmit the data. This paper surveys related research and discusses the challenges of designing networking protocols for such WSNs powered by ambient energy harvesting.
Energy Harvesting in wireless communication: A survey
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.
Energizing wireless sensor networks by energy harvesting systems: Scopes, challenges and approaches
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.
Significance of Energy Harvesting for Wireless Sensor Networks
2014
Wireless Sensor Networks consist of a large number of small in size, low-power but smart sensor nodes are interfacing with one another and deployed over a certain inaccessible geographical area with portable sources like betters having limited power and storage space[1][2]. However, the battery presents several disadvantages required to be replaced or recharge them frequently. One possibility to overcome this power limitations problem is to harvest energy from the ambient limitless available energy sources in the environment surrounding to the sensor nodes are either to recharge batteries or directly use to power the sensor nodes of wireless sensor network. Most of the time, energy harvest from one source is not sufficient to meet the power requirement of sensor nodes. Therefore the hybrid energy harvesting techniques would be a solution to solve the low power problem of wireless sensor nodes. However the energy harvesting process may be irregular, thought there may be a limit on th...
Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs)
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...
An environmental energy harvesting framework for sensor networks
2003
Energy constrained systems such as sensor networks can increase their usable lifetimes by extracting energy from their environment. However, environmental energy will typically not be spread homogeneously over the spread of the network. We argue that significant improvements in usable system lifetime can be achieved if the task allocation is aligned with the spatio-temporal characteristics of energy availability. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been addressed before. We present a distributed framework for the sensor network to adaptively learn its energy environment and give localized algorithms to use this information for task sharing among nodes. Our framework allows the system to exploit its energy resources more efficiently, thus increasing its lifetime. These gains are in addition to those from utilizing sleep modes and residual energy based scheduling mechanisms. Performance studies for an experimental energy environment show up to 200% improvement in lifetime.
Studying the Feasibility of Energy Harvesting in a Mobile Sensor Network
2003
We study the feasibility of extending the lifetime of a wireless sensor network by exploiting mobility. In our system, a small percentage of network nodes are autonomously mobile, allowing them to move in search of energy, recharge, and deliver energy to immobile, energy-depleted nodes. We term this approach energy harvesting. We characterize the problem of uneven energy consumption, suggest energy harvesting as a possible solution, and provide a simple analytical framework to evaluate energy consumption and our scheme. Data from initial feasibility experiments using energy harvesting show promising results.
Challenges for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks
2014
With the recent introduction of Energy-Harvesting nodes, security is gaining more and more importance in sensor networks. By exploiting the ability of scavenging energy from the surrounding environment, the lifespan of a node has drastically increased. This is one of the reason why security needs a new take in this topic. Traditional solutions may not work in this new field. Brand new challenges and threats may arise and new solutions have to be designed. In this paper we present a taxonomy of attacks, focusing on how they change in the energy harvesting scenario compared to regular sensor networks. Finally, we present and discuss existing security solutions for EH-WSNs.
A Survey on Energy Harvesting in Wireless Sensor Network
— 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.
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 2017
Harvesting energy from nonconventional sources in the environment has received increased attention over the past decade from researchers who study these alternative energy sources for low power applications. Although that energy harvested is small and in the order of milliwatt, it can provide enough power for wireless sensors and other low-power applications. In the environment there is a lot of wasted energy that can be converted into electricity to power the various circuits and represents a potentially cheap source of power. Energy harvesting is important because it offers an alternative power supply for electronic devices where is does not exist conventional energy sources. This technology applied in a wireless sensor network (WSN) and devices on the IoT, will eliminate the need for networkbased energy and conventional batteries, will minimize maintenance costs, eliminate cables and batteries and is ecological. It has the same advantage in applications from remote locations, underwater, and other hard to reach places where conventional batteries and energy are not suitable. Energy harvesting will promote environmentally friendly technologies that will save energy, will reduce CO2 emissions, which makes this technology indispensable for achieving nextgeneration smart cities and sustainable society. In response to the challenges of energy, in this article we remind the basics of harvesting energy and we discuss the various applications of this technology where traditional batteries cannot be used.