Duty-Cycle Power Manager for Thermal-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks

Trong Nhan Le (1) , Alain Pegatoquet (2) , Olivier Sentieys (1) , Olivier Berder (3) , Cécile Belleudy (2)

1 CAIRN - Energy Efficient Computing ArchItectures with Embedded Reconfigurable Resources
2 LEAT - Laboratoire d'Electronique, Antennes et Télécommunications
3 GRANIT - Algorithmes et architectures adaptatifs pour les systèmes sans-fils efficaces en énergie

Exploiting energy from the environment to extend the system lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), especially thermal energy, is considered as a promising approach. When considering self-powered systems, the Power Manager (PM) plays an important role in energy harvesting WSNs. Instead of minimizing the consumed energy as in the case of battery-powered systems, it causes the harvesting node to converge to Energy Neutral Operation (ENO) in order to achieve a theoretically infinite lifetime. In this paper, a low complexity PM for a thermal-powered WSN is presented. Our PM adapts the duty cycle of the node according to the estimation of harvested energy and the consumed energy provided by a simple energy monitor for a super capacitor based WSN to achieve the ENO. Experiments are performed on a real WSN platform where harvested energy is extracted from the wasted heat of a PC adapter by two thermoelectric generators.

Mots clés: PC adapter; thermoelectric generators; Wireless sensor networks; Monitoring; Wireless communication; Capacitors; Energy harvesting; Transmitters; Complexity theory; low complexity PM; energy neutral operation; ENO; supercapacitors; battery-powered systems; self-powered systems; thermal energy; thermal-powered wireless sensor networks; duty-cycle power manager; thermoelectric conversion; energy monitor; super capacitor based WSN

Domaines: Systèmes embarqués; Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]

Trong Nhan Le, Alain Pegatoquet, Olivier Sentieys, Olivier Berder, Cécile Belleudy. Duty-Cycle Power Manager for Thermal-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks. 2013 IEEE 24th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), Sep 2013, Londres, United Kingdom. pp.1645-1649, ⟨10.1109/PIMRC.2013.6666406⟩. ⟨hal-00921315v2⟩