Demo: Capacitor leakage aware duty cycle control for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Ryo Shigeta;Yoshihiro Kawahara;Tohru Asami

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan;The University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia;The University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Energy harvesting technology is one of the key technologies for the long-term operation of wireless sensor networks. However, power supply from such energy harvesting sources is not as stable as batteries. In order to compensate for the spatial and temporal variations of the energy harvesting sources, an energy storage device is used. Rechargeable batteries are commonly used in wireless sensor nodes. However, batteries can be charged and discharged for only a limited number of cycles. When the harvested energy is small, capacitors are better suited for energy storage because they can be charged and discharged quickly and efficiently. Moreover, the charge-discharge capability of capacitors does not degrade. The only critical problem of capacitors is that their energy leakage is too large to ignore. In this paper, we propose a capacitor leakage aware duty cycle control for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. Our proposed method focuses on capacitor leakage reduction, which must be considered in a capacitor driven system but has not been considered to date. Our method maximizes the energy usage without degrading system availability by applying optimal control using multiple evaluations of the energy neutral operation and capacitor leakage.