A new approach to design of RF energy harvesting system to enslave wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In trying to reach the goal of controlling the environment, recent years have seen the rapid emergence of Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN). Nevertheless, the lifetime of sensor nodes shows a strong dependence on battery capacity. Recently energy harvesting techniques have been considered to allow the use of WSN in the “deploy and forget” mode. This paper proposes an assessment of the performance of a WSN enslaved to an optimized Radiofrequency Energy Harvesting System (REHS). The energy budget of a sensor node in a Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol is quantified and used to evaluate the performance of the WSN. Keywords: Energy harvesting, LEACH protocol, REHS, WSN