Energy Harvesting Techniques for Internet of Things (IoT)

Abstract

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has accelerated strong interests in the development of low-power wireless sensors. Today, wireless sensors are integrated within IoT systems to gather information in a reliable and practical manner to monitor processes and control activities in areas such as transportation, energy, civil infrastructure, smart buildings, environment monitoring, healthcare, defense, manufacturing, and production. The long-term and self-sustainable operation of these IoT devices must be considered early on when they are designed and implemented. Traditionally, wireless sensors have often been powered by batteries, which, despite allowing low overall system costs, can negatively impact the lifespan and the performance of the entire network they are used in. Energy Harvesting (EH) technology is a promising environment-friendly solution that extends the lifetime of these sensors, and, in some cases completely replaces the use of battery power. In addition, energy harvesting offers economic and practical advantages through the optimal use of energy, and the provisioning of lower network maintenance costs. We review recent advances in energy harvesting techniques for IoT. We demonstrate two energy harvesting techniques using case studies. Finally, we discuss some future research challenges that must be addressed to enable the large-scale deployment of energy harvesting solutions for IoT environments.

Wireless power transfer and energy harvesting in distributed sensor networks: Survey, opportunities, and challenges

“…Conversely, the EH-WPT WSNs are intended to take adequate cognizance of the network's operational lifetime in order to achieve an unlimited lifetime of operation through an energy neutrality when deployed with a constant energy supply within an environment. For DSNs, EH-WPT has enjoyed many practical applications in the following areas: (1) environmental monitoring: [31][32][33] which includes air quality and water monitoring; (2) healthcare monitoring; 32,33 (3) disaster monitoring; 31,32 (4) safety, security, and military applications; 33 (5) structural monitoring; 32 (6) transportation, energy, smart buildings, defense, civil infrastructure, manufacturing and production; 28 (7) farming and foresting monitoring; 31 (8) animal tracking and control; 32,33 and (9) fire and flood detection. 50,66 Environmental monitoring is a widely considered application area of EH-WPT technique for DSN scenarios.…”

Swarm Intelligence Techniques for Mobile Wireless Charging

“…One of the techniques that is being used to prolong the lifetime of a WSN is the energy harvesting (EH) technique [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Although the EH technique can be used to extend the lifetime of the network and solve the node energy restriction problem to some extent, it still has many deficiencies, bordering on environmental limitations [1,9].…”

Dual-Domain Maximum Power Tracking for Multi-Input RF Energy Harvesting with a Reconfigurable Rectifier Array

“…However, solar energy is dramatically affected by the weather or the indoor light sources, and it also requires a photovoltaic panel. Energy harvesting is mainly used in IoTs to reduce network maintenance costs and replace the use of batteries [8][9][10][11][12][13]. Variations in the environment will cause disturbance to the input energy, and may possibly lead to a system shutdown.…”