Idleness as a resource in energy-neutral WSNs

Abstract

In spite of the availability of ultra-low-power microcontrollers and radio transceivers, the power consumption of an active sensor node is much higher than the power provided by state-of-the-art harvesters of suitable size and cost. Hence, the feasibility of energy-neutral wireless sensor networks mainly depends on the capability of the nodes to exploit idle periods to recover the energy spent to perform the tasks assigned to them. This paper discusses the main issues which prevent WSNs to fully exploit the idleness and presents a general power state model capturing the energy efficiency of a mote. VirtualSense motes are used as case study to characterize the proposed power state model and to illustrate its application.