Selected Articles from IEEE Xplore - October 2016

Introduction by Hung-Yu Wei, National Taiwan University

The success of the Internet of Things (IoT) depends on the ease and the cost of deploying and maintaining IoT services in a scalable way. Power supply is among the key issues in IoT device deployment and management. In many deployment scenarios, IoT devices will not be line-powered. In other scenarios, replacing batteries for IoT devices might be too costly. As a result, supplying power through energy harvesting modules (e.g. solar cell, vibration-powered, piezoelectric, RF radiation energy harvesting, etc.) for IoT devices becomes an attractive solution.

To optimize the system performance, IoT system and device design needs to take the properties of energy harvesting sources into consideration. The type of energy harvesting sources and deployment scenarios affect the energy harvesting rate and its variations. Unlike battery-driven IoT deployment cases, system design emphasizes on maximizing the battery life. On the contrary, adaptive power management policies in energy harvesting IoT systems need to harvest, manage, and use energy wisely so that data communications can be enabled when needed. Reliability is an important performance metric for energy harvesting systems. Communications policies and energy policies need to be jointly optimized to achieve reliable operations. In addition, energy harvesting IoT system design is not just about device components. Cross-layer system design that is aware of energy harvesting characteristics is critical to ensure end-to-end IoT service quality.

 

IEEE Xplore References

  1. P. Kamalinejad, C. Mahapatra, Z. Sheng, S. Mirabbasi, V. C. M. Leung and Y. L. Guan, "Wireless energy harvesting for the Internet of Things," in IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 53, no. 6, pp. 102-108, June 2015.
  2. M. Gorlatova, J. Sarik, G. Grebla, M. Cong, I. Kymissis and G. Zussman, "Movers and Shakers: Kinetic Energy Harvesting for the Internet of Things," in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 33, no. 8, pp. 1624-1639, Aug. 2015.
  3. L. Lei, Y. Kuang, X. S. Shen, K. Yang, J. Qiao and Z. Zhong, "Optimal Reliability in Energy Harvesting Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks," in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 15, no. 8, pp. 5399-5413, Aug. 2016.

 

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