Comparison of energy update models for wireless sensor nodes with supercapacitors

The key motivation for this work is the fact that modeling energy storage devices such as supercapacitors (SCs) for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is important for the design and performance assessment of harvesting-aware routing protocols of the future. In this paper, we present a circuit-based model (CBM), a good fit to the empirical data available in the existing literature, and compare it with a linear energy model (LEM) that is often used in literature. Simple closed-form expressions for the number of packets routed by a single node have been derived, and the main point was to point out that the modeling the energy storage medium, namely the SC, impacts the parameter of interest. Our modeling approach and the subsequent comparisons show that the choice of models implies a significant difference in the throughput per node.