Fuzzy algorithm for intelligent wireless sensors with solar harvesting

Abstract

Wireless sensors are sophisticated embedded systems designed for collecting data on systems or processes of interest. In many cases, they are expected to operate in inaccessible locations, without user supervision. As a result, such monitoring systems need to operate autonomously and independently of external sources of energy. To achieve long-lived sustainability, monitoring systems often rely on energy extracted from the environment, e.g. through solar harvesting. Their design is a challenging problem with several conflicting goals and a number of design and implementation possibilities. For obvious reasons, these devices must be designed in an energy efficient way. As a result, they usually have low computational performance and cannot implement complicated control algorithms. At the same time, due to the requirements for autonomy and dependability, they must be endowed with certain degree of adaptability and fault tolerance - properties typically found in intelligent systems. In this contribution, we describe the design flow of an intelligent embedded control system for management of energy use in wireless monitoring systems. The paper also provides a simulation-based analysis of the control system performance.