Effects of Practical Rechargeability Constraints on Perpetual RF Harvesting Sensor Network Operation

Green perpetual sensor network operation is the need of the hour for critical applications, such as surveillance, military, and environment monitoring. Mobile integrated data collection and recharging is a promising approach to meet this requirement by routinely visiting the field nodes for collecting the sensed data and supplying energy via radio frequency (RF) energy transfer. Practical constraints, such as self-discharge and aging effects of the energy storage element (supercapacitor), significantly impact the renewable energy cycle (REC) and, hence, strongly influence the performance of RF energy harvesting networks. To account for the nonidealities in practical supercapacitors, in this paper, a circuit model for REC is proposed, and corresponding RF charging time and node lifetime expressions are derived. Hardware experiments are performed to validate the proposed REC model. REC for complicated supercapacitor models is characterized using duality principle and a generic simulation model. Using the developed analytical models for practical supercapacitors, the size of network for perpetual operation is estimated, which is demonstrated to be significantly less than that predicted by considering ideal supercapacitor behavior. For example, with three-branch supercapacitor model, the estimated sustainable network size is shown to be nearly 52% less than that offered by the ideal supercapacitor model. © 2013 IEEE.