Wind Energy Harvesting for Autonomous Wireless Sensor Networks
Résumé
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) provide a powerful combination of distributed sensing, computing and wireless communication that can be useful in various applications (monitoring, health and fitness, environment, automotive, smart building, etc.). However, energy consumption is a critical issue in the deployment of battery-powered wireless sensor networks. Therefore, energy harvesting provides a potential solution to extend the system lifetime. This paper addresses the problematic of using wind as harvesting source, and weather forecast to improve the prediction of wind condition in the near future. The related issues concern the wind behavior in outdoor condition which is irregular and unpredictable. A wind harvester (a small wind turbine) is considered in order to define a model that translates a weather forecast (the wind speed) into a corresponding energy harvesting prediction. The proposed network architecture has therefore to manage the retrieval of weather forecast from Internet and transmit this information to the end devices. Moreover, the renewable energy storage device needs to be properly sized in order to provide power to the end devices when no more energy can be harvested from the ambient environment. For that, it is required to store a part of the harvested energy when it is available, and this is the role of a power manager (PM). In this paper, we propose different PM policies, two of them exploiting the use of weather forecast to improve the prediction accuracy for WSN nodes.
Mots clés
energy harvesting
telecommunication power management
telecommunication power supplies
weather forecasting
wind turbines
wireless sensor networks
PM policies
WSN
autonomous wireless sensor networks
battery-powered wireless sensor networks
distributed sensing
energy consumption
energy harvesting prediction
network architecture
outdoor condition
power manager
renewable energy storage device
small wind turbine
system lifetime
weather forecast retrieval
wind energy harvesting
wireless communication
Wind energy
Wind forecasting
Wind speed
Energy Neutral Operation
Medium Access Control
Wireless Sensor Network