Holistic online energy assessment: Feasibility and practical application

Combining energy harvesting with energy-aware scheduling enables perpetually operating sensor networks. The practical realization of this goal yet requires reliable and precise holistic online energy assessment. While the building blocks - assessing residual energy, predicting energy intake, and tracing energy consumption - have been studied in detail, the analysis of their interaction on a real platform has been neglected. This paper answers the question, whether these techniques can be easily joined to give a precise and correct picture of a sensor node´s energetic state and behavior. For this purpose, we model the energy flow of a prototype energy-harvesting sensor node and evaluate the joint performance of state-of-the-art energy assessment based on a field test. We verify the system model and show the feasibility of holistic energy assessment, which tolerates small configuration errors, achievable with a combination of generic configuration and online calibration. We also analyze the feasibility of forecasting a node´s future energetic state, and find that the presented method gives sufficient results for uniformly distributed consumption profiles.