Development of an energy-aware algorithm for low power wireless sensor node powered by dual energy harvesting sources

Abstract

A novel self-powered wireless sensor node is proposed and prototyped to overcome the ambient energy lacking in the dual energy harvesting sources by including a secondary energy storage. Moreover, an energy-aware Event-Priority-Driven Dissemination (EPDD) management algorithm has been developed and implemented to control the WSN integrity and reducing the sensor node power consumption as well. EPDD was developed to manage the sensor node operation and to make the sink station able to detect a missing wireless node within the network, which will guarantee the nodes integrity detection. The evaluations revealed that the EPDD shows a good performance in reducing the node power consumption compared to the data push algorithm, whereby, EPDD node was operating 4 hours more than the data push node on the same power source. Regarding the WSN integrity, the EPDD algorithm outpaced the event trigger algorithm, whereby, the EPDD was easily able to detect a node down within the WSN at the contrary of the event trigger.