Ambient Monitoring WSNs with Harvesting-aware Power Management

Abstract

Capillary wireless sensor networks dedicated to air quality monitoring have provided essential information on hazardous air condition, generating early warnings to prevent danger situation for human health. The main challenge of capillary networks is the adoption of environmentally generated energy as primary and/or unique energy source instead of the replacement of hundreds or even thousands of batteries on a regular basis that leads to high costs and practical problems of devices management. We present in this paper a battery-less, autonomous, multi-parametric sensing platform for air quality monitoring, that is harvesting energy from the surrounding environment for perpetual operation. We present a complete system design and experimental results of the evaluation of the energy harvesting section and the budget allocation of the power consumption. Moreover, the paper shows the experimental results of the studies conducted on the sensors section. A tailored calibration process for the sensors' sensitivity and a standard portfolio of different energy sources around the power recovery section could effectively enable the system to trace air quality levels in indoor and outdoor application, in a sort of set and forget scenario.