An Adaptive Energy Management Strategy to Extend Battery Lifetime of Solar Powered Wireless Sensor Nodes

TLDR

Traditional energy management strategies for hybrid‑powered wireless sensor network nodes fail to combine the benefits of supercapacitors and batteries, leaving battery degradation as a key limitation on node lifetime. The study proposes an adaptive rule‑based energy management strategy to extend the battery lifetime of a solar‑powered wireless sensor node. The authors build battery‑degradation‑aware energy models, employ a Poisson distribution to simulate power consumption, and design a rule‑based strategy that adapts to supercapacitor capacity and load conditions, comparing it with conventional approaches and testing its robustness. Simulations demonstrate that the strategy extends node lifetime from several tens of days to over ten years, maintains continuous operation at night, adapts to supercapacitor capacity and workload, and is broadly applicable to extend battery life in solar‑powered WSN nodes.

Abstract

Traditional energy management strategies of wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes with hybrid energy storage do not adequately combine the merits of supercapacitors (SCs) and batteries, and thus, battery degradation remains a problem that restricts the lifetime of the WSN nodes. In this paper, an adaptive rule-based energy management strategy is proposed to extend the battery lifetime of a solar-powered wireless sensor node. The energy models are constructed with the consideration of the battery degradation, and Poisson distribution is utilized to simulate the power consumption variation of the node. A rule-based energy management strategy that is adaptive with the SC capacity and load conditions is designed. Traditional energy management strategies of the WSN nodes are compared with the proposed one. The simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy can improve the node lifetime from several tens of days to more than ten years. Meanwhile, the strategy ensures the continuous availability of the solar-powered WSN nodes even at night throughout the long lifetime. The robustness of the strategy is also tested. It is revealed that the strategy is adaptive with the SC capacity and workload conditions. The proposed strategy is broadly applicable and promising to resolve the problem of limited battery lifetime for the solar-powered WSN nodes.