Implementation and Performance Analysis for Energy Harvesting-based Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) depends on energy to operate and considerable efforts have been devoted to extend its operational lifetime. Energy harvesting (EH) has emerged as one promising approach to prolong the lifetime of a WSN without interrupting its operations. In an EH-WSN, sensor nodes typically have batteries being charged with energy harvested from ambient environments such as wind, solar, water mills etc. However, uncertainties remain about when and how much energy can be harvested over time from the environments and about traffic fluctuation at each node. Unfortunately, existing works on EH-WSN are limited in evaluating the impacts of these factors and the number of the nodes in an EH-WSN on its key performance metrics. This paper, therefore, presents a general method and a practical implementation of a node capable of harvesting solar energy in an EH-WSN. The paper then evaluates the performance of the EH-WSN. Explicit mathematical expressions define models for network operational time, throughput and reliability of the EH-WSN and simulations are used to validate the models. Influential factors are energy arrival rate, traffic rate at each node and the number of nodes in an EH-WSN. The results document that the analytical models and simulations correspond.