Leakage-aware energy synchronization for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

To ensure sustainable operations of wireless sensor systems, environmental energy harvesting has been regarded as the right solution for long-term applications. In energy-dynamic environments, energy conservation is no longer considered necessarily beneficial, because energy storage units (e.g., batteries or capacitors) are limited in capacity and leakage-prone. In contrast to legacy energy conservation approaches, we aim at energy synchronization for wireless sensor devices. The starting point of this work is TwinStar, which uses ultra-capacitor as the only energy storage unit. To efficiently use the harvested energy, we design and implement leakage-aware feedback control techniques to match local and network-wide activity of sensor nodes with the dynamic energy supply from environments. We conduct system evaluation under three typical real-world settings - indoor, outdoor, and mobile backpack under a wide range of system settings. Results indicate our leakage-aware control can effectively utilize energy that could otherwise leak away. Nodes running leakage-aware control can enjoy 70% more energy than the ones running non-leakage-aware control and application performance (e.g., event detection) can be improved significantly.