Predicting Available Energy in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Research Team: Davide Zilli
Investigators: Geoff Merrett

A custom-built node that harvests wind power through a miniature wind turbine.

Wireless Sensor Networks often harvest energy from the environment in order to reduce battery replacement and potentially achieve perpetual operation. However, the energy sources used, such as solar and wind power, are variable and their availability can highly influence the lifetime of the nodes. In particular, by knowing in advance what the available resources are, it becomes possible to tune sensing patterns and communication algorithms, coordinating the consumption with the intake. This project models a network of nodes in order to discover how and in what way the above issues can be addressed. To do this, weather forecast information from the web are combined with local observations, collected through a custom-made deployment of TI MSP430 nodes with a miniature wind turbine.

Computational Modelling Group

Predicting Available Energy in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

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