Distributed Energy Harvesting Emulation

Motivation In traditional energy harvesting applications, sensor nodes are able to store any excess energy in a storage device such as battery or supercapacitor for future use. If correctly dimensioned, such a system will guarantee the node’s operation during periods of energy unavailability. More recently, a radically different research line has emerged which focuses on batteryless, energy-driven sensor nodes. These nodes are designed to work with transient energy sources, i.e. highly volatile sources which produce small bursts of energy. As a result, the node’s operation is highly sporadic, depending entirely on the source’s energy availability, making sensing and communication decisions highly complex. In order to evaluate and compare the performance of different communication schemes, a distributed test infrastructure to emulate previously recorded harvesting traces shall be built in this project.