A hybrid energy harvesting framework for energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks based smart grid applications

In smart grid applications, Wireless Sensor Net-works (WSNs) which consist of battery limited sensor nodes are used on critical equipments of power distribution grids for monitoring purposes. WSN nodes have tight energy constraints hence it is important to reduce the energy consumption of sensor nodes due to harsh propagation characteristics of smart grid environment. One possible way to reduce the energy consumption is to utilize transmission power control where transmission powers are adjusted according to channel conditions. Another technique is to employ energy harvesting schemes to provide additional power for nodes by using environmental energy sources. Solar and electromagnetic energies are two possible environmental energy sources in outdoor substation environments. Solar energy can be efficiently exploited in a sunny day. On the other hand, electromagnetic energy can be used at any time. In this work, we propose a hybrid energy harvesting model that exploits both solar and electromagnetic energies and develop a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) method to minimize the energy dissipation of sensor nodes. By using the MIP framework, we quantify the impact of the proposed hybrid energy harvesting model as well as transmission power control on the energy saving of nodes.