Solar Power Scavenging for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Abstract

Energy scavenging (also known as energy harvesting or ambient power) is a major challenge for scientists to overcome in small, wireless autonomous electronic devices like those used in wearable electronics and wireless sensor networks. As of today, solar energy is the cleanest vitality source available in abundance. This fact has interested the researchers, industries and consumers to develop technology that can harvest solar energy and can possibly convert to useful electrical energy. As we probably are aware, that a node/mote in a wireless sensor network works on AA size battery of 3 V and works up to a life of almost 3 years and it is very difficult to change the on-board battery of a node while it is active in a particular sensing activity. So to sustain the node in a network for the maximum time we need to explore different energy scavenging schemes, of which solar energy scavenging seems to be the most promising. The enhancing research in photovoltaic (PV) application has demonstrated that photovoltaic renewable vitality is considered as a standout amongst the most encouraging source to support the increasing demand in electrical utilization. In this paper, we propose to utilize the solar photovoltaic energy to power a sensor node in a network so that the node may be able to compensate for the energy lost for transmission and reception and at the same time remain active in the network. The paper shows that incorporating the solar status of nodes in the routing decision is feasible by using a solar aware routing protocol (SARP) and it results in reduced overall battery consumption.

Keywords: Solar energy, photovoltaic, SARP, energy scavenging, WSNs

Cite this Article

Piyush Charan, Mohd Maroof Siddiqui, Nupur Mittal, et al. Solar Power Scavenging for Wireless Sensor Networks. Journal of Mobile Computing, Communications & Mobile Networks. 2016; 3(3): 33–41p.