Power management techniques for autonomous WSN

 To extend the system lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), energy harvesting techniques have  been considered as potential solutions for long term operations. When considering self-powered  systems, the Power Manager (PM) plays an important role in energy harvesting WSN. Instead of  minimizing the consumed energy as in the case of battery-powered systems, it makes the harvesting  node converge to Energy Neutral Operation (ENO) to achieve a theoretically infinite lifetime and  maximize the system performance. In this presentation, we address first the problem of modeling and  simulating energy harvesting WSN nodes with efficient power management policies. Different new power  management architectures are introduced, taking into account energy-neutral and negative-energy  conditions. Simulations results show that the throughput of a sensor node can be improved up to 50%  when compared to a state of the art power management algorithm for solar harvesting WSN. A Joint  Duty-Cycle and Transmission Power Management for Energy Harvesting WSN is also introduced. Finally,  a low complexity and harvested source independent power manager is presented. Experiments are  performed in simulation as well as on a real WSN platform with photovoltaic cells in an indoor  environment and also with thermal harvesters.