Energy harvesting wireless sensors for smart cities

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), part of the fast emerging Internet of Things will be playing vital role in transforming our lives. Potentially huge number of these sensors will soon be deployed to perform simple to complex tasks such as automatically controlling heat and light in smart homes to guiding autonomous vehicles and missiles. A big challenge in WSN is providing energy. Battery management and maintenance of these sensors can be a prohibitively expensive exercise because of their abundance. Sensors' performance will deteriorate with the remaining energy level and dead sensor nodes will affect the performance of an entire network, especially in multi-hop networks. Improper battery disposal will also cause environmental pollution and health hazardous in the long run. The energy issue can be alleviated by energy harvesting. The ambience has energy in the forms of light, heat, mechanical vibrations and electromagnetic radiations. This energy has to be collected with appropriate transducers, stored reliably and used for wireless data transmission which is typically happens as bursts. The sporadic and unreliable nature of the energy harvesting process as well as characteristics of electronic elements has to be appropriately modeled to design viable energy harvesting WSN.