Harvesting artificial light indoors to power perpetually a Wireless Sensor Network node

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) devices are usually battery powered and thereby their lifetime is limited. This issue leads to lose data measurements and thus to a performance loss of the underlying WSN application. It also increases the maintenance cost in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios with a huge number of WSN devices. Energy harvesting (EH) is one of the key technologies to solve this issue. In this paper, energy harvesting by artificial light is proposed to power WSN devices in indoor scenarios. Contrary to the state-of-the-art related work, this paper experimentally demonstrates that it is possible, under certain conditions, to achieve energy neutral WSN devices by harvesting energy from artificial light. The experimental setup consists of an EH module, which powers a WSN source data acquisition node, and a WSN sink node which receives the data sent by the first. The EH module consists of a photovoltaic (PV) cell, a boost converter and a 3V coin battery.