Long-term sensor network deployments demand careful power management. While managing power requires understanding the amount of energy harvestable from the local environment, current solar prediction methods rely only on recent local history, which makes them susceptible to high variability. In this paper, we present a model and algorithms for distributed solar current prediction, based on multiple linear regression to predict future solar current based on local, in-situ climatic and solar measurements. These algorithms leverage spatial information from neighbors and adapt to the changing local conditions not captured by global climatic information. We implement these algorithms on our Fleck platform and run a 7-week-long experiment validating our work. In analyzing our results from this experiment, we determined that computing our model requires an increased energy expenditure of 4.5mJ over simpler models (on the order of 10^ -7 of the harvested energy) to gain a prediction improvement of 39.7 .
Small size photovoltaic modules can harvest enough energy to power many personal devices and wireless sensor nodes. The prediction of solar energy intake is possible thanks to the periodical availability of the sunlight and its cyclic behavior. Thus, smart and innovative power management strategies can take advantage from intake prediction algorithms to optimize the energy usage by keeping the system in low power state as long as possible. On the other hand, very accurate predictions need time and energy because of complex calculations, thus an algorithm that can provide the optimal trade-off between computational effort and accuracy is a breakthrough for systems with tight power constraints. In this paper we introduce an innovative, efficient and reliable solar prediction algorithm, the weather conditioned moving average (WCMA). The algorithm has been further enhanced to increase performance using a phase displacement regulator (PDR) which reduces the average error to less than 9.2 at a minimum energy cost. The proposed new algorithm compares favorably with several competing approaches. Recent advances in energy harvesting materials and ultra-low-power communications will soon enable the realization of networks composed of energy harvesting devices. These devices will operate using very low ambient energy, such as indoor light energy. We focus on characterizing the energy availability in indoor environments and on developing energy allocation algorithms for energy harvesting devices. First, we present results of our long-term indoor radiant energy measurements, which provide important inputs required for algorithm and system design (e.g., determining the required battery sizes). Then, we focus on algorithm development, which requires nontraditional approaches, since energy harvesting shifts the nature of energy-aware protocols from minimizing energy expenditure to optimizing it. Moreover, in many cases, different energy storage types (rechargeable battery and a capacitor) require different algorithms. We develop algorithms for determining time fair energy allocation in systems with predictable energy inputs, as well as in systems where energy inputs are stochastic. Harvesting energy from the environment is feasible in many applications to ameliorate the energy limitations in sensor networks. In this paper, we present an adaptive duty cycling algorithm that allows energy harvesting sensor nodes to autonomously adjust their duty cycle according to the energy availability in the environment. The algorithm has three objectives, namely (a) achieving energy neutral operation, i.e., energy consumption should not be more than the energy provided by the environment, (b) maximizing the system performance based on an application utility model subject to the above energy-neutrality constraint, and (c) adapting to the dynamics of the energy source at run-time. We present a model that enables harvesting sensor nodes to predict future energy opportunities based on historical data. We also derive an upper bound on the maximum achievable performance assuming perfect knowledge about the future behavior of the energy source. Our methods are evaluated using data gathered from a prototype solar energy harvesting platform and we show that our algorithm can utilize up to 58 more environmental energy compared to the case when harvesting-aware power management is not used. Recently, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) begin to use the solar energy. But the energy from the environment is usually unstable, An efficient solar prediction algorithm should be studied. In this paper, a novel solar energy prediction algorithm, namely Weather-Conditioned Selective Moving Average (WCSMA), is proposed by using the trend similarity of energy harvesting and the classification of sunny and cloudy days. The simulation results show that the relative mean error of WCSMA algorithm only around 10 , and it is much lower than the Exponential Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) algorithm which is widely used now. Solar panels are frequently used in wireless sensor nodes because they can theoretically provide quite a bit of harvested energy. However, they are not a reliable, consistent source of energy because of the Sun's cycles and the everchanging weather conditions. Thus, in this paper we present a fast, efficient and reliable solar prediction algorithm, namely, Weather-Conditioned Moving Average (WCMA) that is capable of exploiting the solar energy more efficiently than state-of-the-art energy prediction algorithms (e.g. Exponential Weighted Moving Average EWMA). In particular, WCMA is able to effectively take into account both the current and past-days weather conditions, obtaining a relative mean error of only 10 . When coupled with energy management algorithm, it can achieve gains of more than 90 in energy utilization with respect to EWMA under the real working conditions of the Shimmer node, an active sensing platform for structural health monitoring. Energy harvesting offers a promising alternative to solve the sustainability limitations arising from battery size constraints in sensor networks. Several considerations in using an environmental energy source are fundamentally different from using batteries. Rather than a limit on the total energy, harvesting transducers impose a limit on the instantaneous power available. Further, environmental energy availability is often highly variable and a deterministic metric such as residual battery capacity is not available to characterize the energy source. The different nodes in a sensor network may also have different energy harvesting opportunities. Since the same end-user performance may be achieved using different workload allocations at multiple nodes, it is important to adapt the workload allocation to the spatio-temporal energy availability profile in order to enable energy-neutral operation of the network. This paper describes power management techniques for such energy harvesting sensor networks. Platform design considerations as well as power scaling techniques at the node-level and network-level are described.