Rechargeable Sensor Networks ─ Technology, Theory, and Application - Introducing Energy Harvesting to Sensor Networks

Harvesting energy from ambient energy resources to power electronic devices has been recognized as a promising solution to address the issue of powering the ever-growing number of mobile devices around us. The key technologies in the rapid growth of the energy harvesting field focus on developing solutions to capture ambient energy surrounding the mobile devices and to convert it into usable electrical energy to recharge them. Achieving sustainable network lifetime via battery-aware design brings forth a new frontier for energy optimization techniques, which resulted in the developments of low-power hardware design at the early stage, while has now evolved into power-aware design and even battery-aware design. This book covers technologies of rechargeable sensor networks protocol behinds scavenging energy from sources of solar, vibration, temperature variations, wind, biochemical energy, to passive human power, as a means and replacement for the batteries on mobile and sensor devices.