We present our Zero Energy Network'' (ZEN) protocol stack for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks applications. The novelty in our work is @math fold: (1) Energy harvesting aware fully featured MAC layer. Carrier sensing, Backoff algorithms, ARQ, RTS CTS mechanisms, Adaptive Duty Cycling are either auto configurable or available as tunable parameters to match the available energy (b) Energy harvesting aware Routing Protocol. The multi-hop network establishes routes to the base station using a modified version of AODVjr routing protocol assisted by energy predictions. (c) Application of a time series called Holt-Winters'' for predicting the incoming energy. (d) A distributed smart application running over the ZEN stack which utilizes a multi parameter optimized perturbation technique to optimally use the available energy. The application is capable of programming the ZEN stack in an energy efficient manner. The energy harvested distributed smart application runs on a realistic solar energy trace with a three year seasonality database. We implement a smart application, capable of modifying itself to suit its own as well as the network's energy level. Our analytical results show a close match with the measurements conducted over EHWSN testbed.
Several optimization techniques have been discussed in literature for battery driven multihop WSN's in the past where the objective is to maximize the network lifetime by minimizing energy consumption @cite_21 , @cite_7 . With a view on utilizing the harvested energy in an optimized manner, adapting the performance of an application while respecting the limited and time-varying amount of available power in EHWSN is discussed in @cite_23 . A formal model that actively adapts application parameters such as rate of sensing'' is used to optimize the performance. The simulation study does not consider network related parameters or network wide energy levels. A Lazy Scheduling Algorithm'' is proposed and tested for its effectiveness by assigning several power values to the system in @cite_11 . Task admittance and future energy prediction is carried out with energy variability characterization curves generated by modeling the power source.
@cite_21 @cite_23 @cite_7 @cite_11
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Traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) face the problem of a limited-energy source, typically batteries, resulting in the need for careful and effective utilization of the energy source. However, inevitable energy depletion will eventually disturb the operation of a WSN. Energy harvesting (EH) technology is acquiring particular interest, because it has the potential to provide a continuous energy supply in battery-powered WSNs. Solar energy is the most effective environmental energy for EH-WSNs because of its high energy intensity, which comes from a non-controllable source. Therefore, the prediction of future energy availability is a critical issue, as the amount of the harvestable energy may vary over time. In this paper, a novel solar energy prediction algorithm with Q-learning, called Q-learning-based solar energy prediction (QL-SEP), is proposed. Q-learning is an effective way of predicting future actions based on past observations. The distinctive feature of QL-SEP is that not only past days’ observations but also the current weather conditions are considered for prediction. The performance of QL-SEP is simulated in this paper using real-world measurements obtained from a solar panel in comparison with the state-of-art approaches. Power management is an important concern in sensor networks, because a tethered energy infrastructure is usually not available and an obvious concern is to use the available battery energy efficiently. However, in some of the sensor networking applications, an additional facility is available to ameliorate the energy problem: harvesting energy from the environment. Certain considerations in using an energy harvesting source are fundamentally different from that in using a battery, because, rather than a limit on the maximum energy, it has a limit on the maximum rate at which the energy can be used. Further, the harvested energy availability typically varies with time in a nondeterministic manner. While a deterministic metric, such as residual battery, suffices to characterize the energy availability in the case of batteries, a more sophisticated characterization may be required for a harvesting source. Another issue that becomes important in networked systems with multiple harvesting nodes is that different nodes may have different harvesting opportunity. In a distributed application, the same end-user performance may be achieved using different workload allocations, and resultant energy consumptions at multiple nodes. In this case, it is important to align the workload allocation with the energy availability at the harvesting nodes. We consider the above issues in power management for energy-harvesting sensor networks. We develop abstractions to characterize the complex time varying nature of such sources with analytically tractable models and use them to address key design issues. We also develop distributed methods to efficiently use harvested energy and test these both in simulation and experimentally on an energy-harvesting sensor network, prototyped for this work. Energy harvesting has recently emerged as a feasible option to increase the operating time of sensor networks. If each node of the network, however, is powered by a fluctuating energy source, common power management solutions have to be reconceived. This holds in particular if real-time responsiveness of a given application has to be guaranteed. Task scheduling at the single nodes should account for the properties of the energy source, capacity of the energy storage as well as deadlines of the single tasks. We show that conventional scheduling algorithms (like e.g. EDF) are not suitable for this scenario. Based on this motivation, we have constructed optimal scheduling algorithms that jointly handle constraints from both energy and time domain. Further we present an admittance test that decides for arbitrary task sets, whether they can be scheduled without deadline violations. To this end, we introduce the concept of energy variability characterization curves (EVCC) which nicely captures the dynamics of various energy sources. Simulation results show that our algorithms allow significant reductions of the battery size compared to Earliest Deadline First scheduling. Recently, there has been a substantial interest in the design of systems that receive their energy from regenerative sources such as solar cells. In contrast to approaches that minimize the power consumption subject to performance constraints, we are concerned with optimizing the performance of an application while respecting the limited and time-varying amount of available power. In this paper, we address power management of, e.g., wireless sensor nodes which receive their energy from solar cells. Based on a prediction of the future available energy, we adapt parameters of the application in order to maximize the utility in a long-term perspective. The paper presents a formal model of the corresponding optimization problem including constraints concerning buffer sizes, timing, and rates. Instead of solving the optimization problem online which may be prohibitively complex in terms of running time and energy consumption, we apply multiparametric programming to precompute the application parameters offline for different environmental conditions and system states. In order to guarantee sustainable operation, we propose a hierarchical software design which comprises a worst-case prediction of the incoming energy. As a further contribution, we suggest a new method for approximate multiparametric linear programming which substantially lowers the computational demand and memory requirement of the embedded software. Our approaches are evaluated using long-term measurements of solar energy in an outdoor environment.