EmRep: energy management relying on state‐of‐charge extrema prediction

Abstract

The persistent rise of Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks entails increasing demands on the efficiency and configurability of energy management. New applications often profit from or even require user-defined time-varying utilities, for example, the health assessment of bridges is only possible at rushhour. However, monitoring times do not necessarily overlap with energy harvest periods. This misalignment is often corrected by over-provisioning the energy storage. Favourable small-footprint and cheap energy storage, however, fill up quickly and waste surplus energy. Hence, EmRep is presented, which decouples the energy management of high-intake from low-intake harvest periods. Based on the State-of-Charge extrema prediction, the authors enhance energy management and reduce saturation of energy storage by design. Considering multiple user-defined utility profiles, the benefits of EmRep in combination with a variety of prediction algorithms, time resolutions, and energy storage sizes are showcased. EmRep is tailored to platforms with small energy storage, in which it is found that it doubles effective utility, and also increases performance by 10% with large-sized storage.