Energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs): A review

Kofi Sarpong Adu-Manu, Nadir Adam, Cristiano Tapparello, Hoda Ayatollahi, Wendi Heinzelman

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

294 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are crucial in supporting continuous environmental monitoring, where sensor nodes are deployed and must remain operational to collect and transfer data from the environment to a base-station. However, sensor nodes have limited energy in their primary power storage unit, and this energy may be quickly drained if the sensor node remains operational over long periods of time. Therefore, the idea of harvesting ambient energy from the immediate surroundings of the deployed sensors, to recharge the batteries and to directly power the sensor nodes, has recently been proposed. The deployment of energy harvesting in environmental field systems eliminates the dependency of sensor nodes on battery power, drastically reducing the maintenance costs required to replace batteries. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art in energy-harvesting WSNs for environmental monitoring applications, including Animal Tracking, Air Quality Monitoring, Water Quality Monitoring, and Disaster Monitoring to improve the ecosystem and human life. In addition to presenting the technologies for harvesting energy from ambient sources and the protocols that can take advantage of the harvested energy, we present challenges that must be addressed to further advance energy-harvesting-based WSNs, along with some future work directions to address these challenges.

Original languageEnglish
Article number10
JournalACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
Volume14
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2018

Keywords

  • Energy harvesting
  • Energy scavenging
  • Self-powered devices
  • Wireless sensor networks

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