Poster Abstract: Long-Term Energy-Neutral Operation of Solar Energy-Harvesting Sensor Nodes under Time-Varying Utility

Abstract

Sensor networks increasingly rely on harvesting energy from the environment to sense, process, and transmit data. Online energy availability forecasting and energy management are critical to ensure long-term energy-neutral operation of battery-powered energy-harvesting sensor nodes. Existing methods focus on applications with time-invariant utility and custom-tailored hardware platforms, which limits their effectiveness across diverse application domains, different platforms, and in the face of aging hardware components. To address these limitations, we formulate an optimisation problem with respect to time-varying utility under the given hardware constraints. We also present PREACT, an online energy-management algorithm that approximates the optimal solution to the optimisation problem by incorporating long-term energy forecasting.