Management of Solar Harvested Energy in Actuation-based and Event-triggered Systems

Today’s sensing applications require low energy consumption while managing various types of tasks, ranging from processing and communication, to actuation and sensing. In this paper we develop a method to trade off energy availability, from both energy harvesting and storage, with the energy costs of the tasks the sensor node needs to accomplish. Our strategy consists of three main parts: a solar energy harvesting predictor, an energy recharge estimator, and an energy management scheme that takes into account task characteristics and external event triggers. Our results show that the solar energy predictor and energy recharge estimator give results within 10% of the actual values. The energy management scheme we implement is two times more efficient than one based on binary search in maximizing the overall energy consumption while delivering the needed performance.