Analysing the Design of a Solar Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Node for Agricultural Applications

The advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) presents a solution to improving agricultural crop production, to achieve food security and meet the sustainable development goal to eliminate hunger. A literature review indicates that an energy efficient wireless sensor network (WSN) is a good solution for remote crop monitoring. One way of creating an energy efficient WSN is to ensure that the nodes themselves are energy efficient. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of an energy efficient sensor node, a key component in an IoT-based wireless sensor network solution for crop monitoring. A review of recent literature articles is used to analyze the energy usage of each of the components and the energy contribution of a solar harvesting sub-system. Our analysis, in a generic model that can be used to effectively design an energy efficient wireless sensor node.