Context-aware energy management for energy-self-sufficient network nodes in wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are increasingly applied for various applications. Many advantages of WMNs are based on the autonomous operation of the mesh nodes. A main factor to achieve autonomy is energy-self-sufficiency. Here, the usage of renewable energy generators combined with energy storages is a common approach. However, an efficient mechanism is needed to manage the constrained energy resources as well as the amount of generated energy. Therefore, we propose in this paper a context-aware energy management system (CA-EMS) for energy-self-sufficient network nodes. In our CA-EMS, we determine an energy budget on basis of energy generation, energy consumption and available context information. Furthermore, we classify the available context, and we define context-based rules and actions to keep the energy budget of the nodes in balance. Our use case, that is a real-world system, shows more practically, that applying CA-EMS prolongs the runtime of the mesh node while keeping the energy budget in balance.