Solar-Based Energy Harvesting and Low-Power Wireless Networks

In modern industrial applications, machines and facilities, more and more sensors are used to control and optimise the processes. To be flexible and reduce cost, wireless sensors can be used in a broad range of applications. To prevent regular battery replacement, there is the possibility to supply wireless sensors by energy harvesting. In this chapter, we investigate the possibility to use solar-based energy harvesting to supply wireless sensors. For this, we consider four wireless network protocols and evaluate the power consumption using a simple sensor use case with different communication parameters. We further measure how much power can actually be harvested in a typical office environment with natural light. To provide realistic results, different sensor locations as well as seasonal changes are considered. The evaluations are combined to understand what size of solar cell is needed to supply the considered wireless protocols with different configurations.