Heliomote: enabling long-lived sensor networks through solar energy harvesting

The crucial need for long-lived and autonomous operation has elevated power and energy consumption to primary optimization metrics during wireless sensor network design. While most work in the field of power management and low-power design has focused on optimizing the energy consumer (i.e., the sensor node, including its hardware, software, applications, and network protocols), very little work has targeted the energy supply system itself. A practical approach to alleviating the problem of limited battery resources in sensor nodes is the use of environmental energy harvesting. Solar energy harvesting, in particular, holds significant promise since photovoltaic conversion techniques are now mature enough to permit the development of cheap and small, yet reasonably efficient, solar panels. Our demonstration showcases our recent research in designing solar energy harvesting systems, as well as harvesting aware performance scaling algorithms and network protocols [1].