Sensors with lasers: building a WSN power grid
Naveed Anwar Bhatti, Affan Ahmed Syed, Muhammad Hamad Alizai · Information Processing in Sensor Networks · 2014
We present here a first practical energy distribution architecture that allows us to decouple energy supply from sensing activities in WSN. Such a separation of responsibilities enables us to utilize abundant energy sources distant from the sensing location, allowing unrestricted lifetime and resolving unequal energy consumption in WSN. We demonstrate energy transfer for practical decoupling using low-cost and -footprint, laser μ-power beaming that powers current WSN platforms at 100m of range. We design and implement LAMP: a tiered architecture to manage energy supply to both mesh and clustered WSN deployments using an energy distribution protocol. We evaluate our system to show that, for an additional cost of $29 per mote, LAMP can support perpetual mesh functionality for up to 40 sensors or 120 nodes in clustered operation.