State-of-charge assessment for supercap-powered sensor nodes: Keep it simple stupid!

Electric double-layer capacitors, also known as supercaps, have several advantages over traditional energy buffers: They do not require complex charging circuits, offer virtually unlimited charge-discharge cycles, and generally enable easy state-of-charge assessment. A closer look yet reveals that leakage and internal reorganization effects hamper state-of-charge assessment by means of terminal voltage, particularly after a charging cycle. Sophisticated models capture this effect at the cost of an increased calculation and parameter-estimation complexity. As this is hardly feasible on low-power, low-resource sensor nodes, we evaluate the performance of simple models on a real energy-harvesting sensor node platform. We show that model errors are as low as 1-2% on average and never exceed 5% in our experiments, supporting that there is no need to employ more complex models on common sensor node platforms, equipped with unreliable ADC readings and uncertain consumption due to hardware variation in the same order of magnitude.