Simulation of adaptive duty cycling in solar powered environmental monitoring systems

This paper discusses a simulator for energy management in wireless sensor platforms. The simulator presently focuses on environmentally powered monitoring systems and sensors described within this document. The Mathworks Simulink environment was used to construct the simulator and allows real meteorological data to be used for long term simulated operation under different energy management strategies. Three of these strategies are tested and presented here; one is dynamically controlled by a fuzzy rule based system which allows it to adapt to the environmental energy profile, while the other two are statically controlled for comparison. The static control strategies seek to minimize energy related failures or to maximize the number of stored measurements disregarding failures. Ultimately, the strategy which allows the simulated sensor platform to adapt its operational level to the energy available in the environment is superior. It produces a data set with the highest number of data points and a very low number of consecutive device failures. It performs better in both areas than either of the other static energy management strategies.