An Analytical Approach to the Design of Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Nodes

Energy harvesting is one of the promising solutions to the problem of limited battery capacity in many wireless devices. This paper addresses the problem of system design of energy harvesting capable wireless devices in terms of the required sizes for energy and data buffers, as well as the size of the harvester, for given delay and loss requirements. We analyze the performance of an energy harvesting node, considering a stochastic model that takes into account energy harvesting and event arrival processes. We derive closed-form expressions for the probability of event loss and the average queueing delay. Our event-driven continuous time simulations validate our analytical results. Employing these results, we provide a near-optimal approach to the design of the system in terms of sizing the energy harvesting device, the energy storage, and the event queue capacity.