Study on Solar-powered IoT Node Autonomy

Renewable energy sources may ease the deployment of IoT nodes in smart city scenarios where access to a steady power supply is often limited. In this paper, we report experimental work to evaluate the feasibility of sustaining the operation of an IoT node from an autonomous power supply, composed of a photo-voltaic (PV) energy source, batteries and a controller. We measured a tentative deployment, observe that typical forecasting tools are inadequate to dimension such micro-supplies, and used greedy search to find the best system configuration.