Review on energy harvesting and energy management for sustainable wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Sustainable wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being widely used nowadays due to two key driving technologies behind them i.e. energy harvesting and energy management. Energy harvesting from environmental energy sources such as solar, wind, thermal, mechanical and so forth are introduced from the perspective of energy supply to the WSN, while energy management of WSN such as the design of MAC protocol, design of routing protocol, and dynamic power management technology are presented from the perspective of energy conservation within the WSN itself. To better understand them in details for optimizing the sustainable WSN performance, in this paper, a review of these two enabling technologies are performed. More depth research into their combined efforts for sustainable WSN is presented and then illustrated with a case study. One of the most commonly referred energy harvesting source, i.e. solar energy, and its energy management which includes a new energy forecast model of wireless sensor nodes and a new model of energy distribution in WSNs using data collection protocol is investigated and demonstrated.