A Novel Design of Adaptive Reconfigurable Multicell Battery for Power-Aware Embedded Networked Sensing Systems

Battery-powered embedded networked sensing systems become more and more pervasive with the fast-paced deployment of various remote sensing applications. How to prolong the battery operating time is one of the most challenging areas in the design and development of these sensing systems due to the fact that the battery operation is much more dynamic and complex than considered, which is derived from its application and its internal structure (multiple hardwired series/parallel cells) to produce a specific voltage and capacity. Current research on prolonging the battery operating time is mainly focusing on the low-power hardware and energy-efficient network protocol designs, and simply treats the battery as a passive two-terminal energy source. In this paper, we will propose a novel adaptive, proactive, and reconfigurable multicell battery design for supporting power-aware hardware and energy-efficient network protocols for embedded networked systems, which provides a whole new perspective to look at the energy problems of battery- powered embedded networked sensing systems. A theoretical modeling of the proposed design is provided, and simulation results show that the proposed design can significantly enhance the energy performance, especially for low voltage and low discharge current scenarios.