A UML/MARTE extension for designing energy harvesting in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Power supply is the major concern in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) applications. Currently, the node lifetime is limited by a battery supply which is a short lifetime, unmanageable and uneconomical. Energy Harvesting was proposed as a promising alternative to power sensor nodes in many application fields. Several energy harvesting concepts are considered in WSNs systems such as solar, vibration, thermal, kinetic, acoustic noise, radio frequency (RF), biochemical and hybrid energy sources. The existing modeling design for the power supply section of sensor nodes is limited to the design of solar energy harvesting method which is mostly employed in outdoor applications with sufficient sun light. However, other energy harvesting concepts are potential ambient sources of energy which offer an enough amount of power for sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a high level methodology based on UML/MARTE standard to model specifications of outlined energy harvesting devices in the WSNs. We define new packages extending the “HW_Harvesting” package which is extending the “HW_PowerSupply” package. A case study of a WSNs system regarding leak detection in water pipeline monitoring is used to evaluate the practical use of our proposal.