An Electric Charge Model Based on the Energy Harvesting WSN

The improvement of energy utilization efficiency has been an important research subject of EH-WSN. The existing studies usually use the energy model to analyze the network. As the harvesting and consumption of energy is affected by the real-time voltage, the energy model is not suitable for the EH-WSN that varies greatly with voltage. Notably, most of the present energy harvesting platforms adopt the linear regulator. As the charge quantity in and out of linear regulator is the same, we use the charge quantity to calculate the energy, avoiding the influence from the variation of voltage. Accordingly, this paper firstly proposes the electric charge conservation model based on the EH-WSN, avoiding the complicated computation of voltage and energy. The computation cost is greatly saved and the accuracy of the model is improved, moreover, an estimation method is presented for the charge quantity in this paper. Experiments show that the model is capable to operate practically in the IEA platform and accurately show the charge quantity variation of EH-WSN nodes.