Tailoring Micro-solar Systems to Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Energetic needs of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been thoroughly studied. Among the most important results, clustering protocols are able to reduce significantly energy consumption in these networks. In the last few years though, focus has also been put on energy harvesting for WSNs. With energy harvesting researchers aim to reach energy neutrality, which means the network only runs on harvested energy. Many papers propose design options for energy harvested WSN, but they only focus on ad-hoc solutions, homogeneous WSNs, or pose other limitations. In this paper we propose a new approach. We study the energetic need of a heterogeneous WSN clustered with a known algorithm (REECHD) through simulation, in order to calculate the minimum and ideal energy to harvest for a given network. Given that, we design an appropriate micro-solar power system to achieve energy neutrality.