Unified System- and Circuit-Level Optimization of RES-Based Power-Supply Systems for the Nodes of Wireless Sensor Networks

Summarization: An extensive utilization of wireless sensor networks has evolved during the last years for monitoring various environmental and artificial processes. When operating in remote locations, the nodes of wireless sensor networks are typically power supplied by an energy production and management system, comprising low-power renewable energy sources, a power electronic converter, and a battery-based energy storage unit. In this paper, a methodology is proposed for optimally designing the energy production and processing system of a wireless sensor network node simultaneously at both the renewable power-supply system level and the power converter circuit level, through a unified design process. The impact of the objective function type on the power-supply design is also investigated in this paper. Design optimization and experimental results are presented, which demonstrate that the optimized power-supply structures derived by applying the proposed optimization technique exhibit lower cost of generated energy compared to partially optimized or totally nonoptimized structures and by that reduce the cost of the overall wireless sensor network node. Presented on: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics