research-article

Powering indoor sensing with airflows: a trinity of energy harvesting, synchronous duty-cycling, and sensing

Authors:

Yaowen YangAuthors Info & Claims

SenSys '13: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems

Article No.: 16, Pages 1 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/2517351.2517365

Published: 11 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Whereas a lot of efforts have been put on energy conservation in wireless sensor networks, the limited lifetime of these systems still hampers their practical deployments. This situation is further exacerbated indoors, as conventional energy harvesting (e.g., solar) ceases to work. To enable long-lived indoor sensing, we report in this paper a self-sustaining sensing system that draws energy from indoor environments, adapts its duty-cycle to the harvested energy, and pays back the environment by enhancing the awareness of the indoor microclimate through an "energy-free" sensing.

First of all, given the pervasive operation of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems indoors, our system harvests energy from airflow introduced by the HVAC systems to power each sensor node. Secondly, as the harvested power is tiny (only of hundreds of μW), an extremely low but synchronous duty-cycle has to be applied whereas the system gets no energy surplus to support existing synchronization schemes. So we design two complementary synchronization schemes that cost virtually no energy. Finally, we exploit the feature of our harvester to sense the airflow speed (which can be used to infer the indoor microclimate) in an energy-free manner. To our knowledge, this is the first indoor wireless sensing system that encapsulates energy harvesting, network operating, and sensing all together.

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Cited By

Arif MMaya JAnandan NPérez DTonello AZangl HRinner B(2024)Resource-Efficient Ubiquitous Sensor Networks for Smart Agriculture: A SurveyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.351681412(193332-193364)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3516814
Zheng XHe LWang SLiu XLiu RCheng G(2023)A review of piezoelectric energy harvesters for harvesting wind energySensors and Actuators A: Physical10.1016/j.sna.2023.114190(114190)Online publication date: Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sna.2023.114190
Sandhu MKhalifa SPortmann MJurdak RSandhu MKhalifa SPortmann MJurdak R(2023)Simultaneous Sensing and Energy HarvestingSelf-Powered Internet of Things10.1007/978-3-031-27685-9_5(71-93)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27685-9_5
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Index Terms

Powering indoor sensing with airflows: a trinity of energy harvesting, synchronous duty-cycling, and sensing
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Distributed architectures
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Distributed systems organizing principles

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cover image ACM Conferences

SenSys '13: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems

November 2013

443 pages

ISBN:9781450320276

DOI:10.1145/2517351

General Chair:
Chiara Petrioli
University of Rome `La Sapienza'
,
Program Chairs:
Landon Cox
Duke University
,
Kamin Whitehouse
University of Virginia

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 November 2013

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SenSys '13: The 11th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems

November 11 - 15, 2013

Roma, Italy

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SenSys '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 21 of 123 submissions, 17%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 174 of 867 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

Arif MMaya JAnandan NPérez DTonello AZangl HRinner B(2024)Resource-Efficient Ubiquitous Sensor Networks for Smart Agriculture: A SurveyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.351681412(193332-193364)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3516814
Zheng XHe LWang SLiu XLiu RCheng G(2023)A review of piezoelectric energy harvesters for harvesting wind energySensors and Actuators A: Physical10.1016/j.sna.2023.114190(114190)Online publication date: Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sna.2023.114190
Sandhu MKhalifa SPortmann MJurdak RSandhu MKhalifa SPortmann MJurdak R(2023)Simultaneous Sensing and Energy HarvestingSelf-Powered Internet of Things10.1007/978-3-031-27685-9_5(71-93)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27685-9_5
Sandhu MKhalifa SPortmann MJurdak RSandhu MKhalifa SPortmann MJurdak R(2023)Energy Harvester as an Information SourceSelf-Powered Internet of Things10.1007/978-3-031-27685-9_4(53-67)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27685-9_4
Sandhu MKhalifa SPortmann MJurdak RSandhu MKhalifa SPortmann MJurdak R(2023)Using Ambient Energy to Power IoT SensorsSelf-Powered Internet of Things10.1007/978-3-031-27685-9_3(29-51)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27685-9_3
Aldawood GBardaweel H(2022)Self-Powered Self-Contained Wireless Vibration Synchronous Sensor for Fault DetectionSensors10.3390/s2206235222:6(2352)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/s22062352
Tobias NSorber JGummeson JLee SGao JXing G(2022)Old Dog, New TricksProceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3560905.3568103(925-927)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3560905.3568103
Ma DLan GXu WHassan MHu W(2022)Simultaneous Energy Harvesting and Gait Recognition Using Piezoelectric Energy HarvesterIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2020.303504521:6(2198-2209)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2020.3035045
Ma XZhou S(2022)A review of flow-induced vibration energy harvestersEnergy Conversion and Management10.1016/j.enconman.2022.115223254(115223)Online publication date: Mar-2022
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Sandhu MKhalifa SJurdak RPortmann M(2021)Task Scheduling for Energy-Harvesting-Based IoT: A Survey and Critical AnalysisIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2021.30861868:18(13825-13848)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
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