Energy harvesting for sensor nodes: design, simulation and implementation

Alex Susu, Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne

Abstract: Environmental energy is becoming a feasible alternative to traditional energy sources for many low-power systems, such as wireless sensor nodes.

In this talk we approach two different topics of the research in energy harvesting:

Firstly, we describe a design methodology for an environmentally powered device, focusing on aspects such as the selection of the energy storage elements, choosing the size of the harvester and defining the duty cycle of the running application. For this we define a realistic behavioral model of a sensor node, in order to perform design space exploration of a node implementation running, for example, a wireless body area network application. This model captures the statistical behavior of the radio interface and of the solar energy harvester, which allows designers to formally assess statistical properties of the system, such as the probability of achieving a given lifetime, or the expected downtime or energy wasted for various system parameters.

Then, we move from an individual node perspective to a network setting. We present an implementation on SensorCube nodes running various MAC layer protocols under TinyOS. We also present an updated version of PowerTOSSIM, the simulator for TinyOS, that allows to assess the scalability of the various MAC protocols in use.

About the speaker: Alex Susu received his engineering degree in Computer Science from the Polytechnical University of Bucharest, Romania in 2003 and later obtained a M.Eng. degree in Embedded Systems Design in 2004, from the University of Lugano. He is currently a PhD Assistant in the Laboratory of Integrated Systems (IC-LSI) at EPFL since October 2005.

 

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