Energy Harvesting Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks: Energy Model and Battery Dimensioning

Wireless Sensor Networks present a pending challenge for a complete deployability due to energy requirements. The low power density that these energy sources provide compared to the required energy for the communication process creates the necessity of temporal storage. Unfortunately, the random nature of the power sources implies that the energy storage unit might not be able to guarantee the communication at all time, thus giving a certain loss probability, which is a function of the energy storage capacity. Typical solutions reduce this loss probability by over-dimensioning the battery, producing a very large overhead in size. In this paper, a scalable energy model is presented for the estimation of the loss probability. Accordingly, this energy model is applied in order to provide battery dimensioning guidelines. The results show that, by means of an accurate energy model, a certain loss probability can be achieved, while reducing up to 4 times the needed energy storage capacity.