Energy Harvesting IoT Devices as the Reliable Sensing Backbone of Smart Cities

STEFANO CHESSA; MELISA KUZMAN; ANTONIO CARUSO; X. D. TORO GARCÍA; SOLEDAD ESCOLAR; JUAN CARLOS LÓPEZ

Pisa

Conferencia; 5th Italian Conference on ICT for Smart Cities And Communities; 2019

University of Pisa & CINI

The deployment of a large number of Intenet of Things (IoT) devices, is without any dubt, a fundamental enabling technology for any scenario that involves Smart Cities. An interesting class of harvesting devices extract the energy foundnaturally in the environment and convert it into energy able to either sustain the device?s operation and recharge its batteries which, in conjunction with an appropriate scheduling strategy, led to the device to an electrically sustainable state (i.e. an energyneutral state). In this abstract we report a group of researcha ctivites on this class of devices, that goes from the theoretical analysis and specification of better scheduling algorithms toproperly tune the load of each node as a function of the energy harvested at any given moment, to the real development of a testbed, for outdoor monitoring, used to validate the algorithms against real-world conditions. The testbed was deployed on the roof of a building and it executed uninterruptedly an application able to generate a dataset with the collected information over aperiod of more than two months. This dataset has been online published to be used for different researching purposes, as for instance, prediction models of the energy production.