Battery-Free Wireless Sensor Networks: A Comprehensive Survey
Zhipeng Cai, Quan Chen, Tuo Shi, Tongxin Zhu, Kunyi Chen, Yingshu Li
Abstract
Battery-free wireless sensor network (BF-WSN) (including energy harvesting network and energy rechargeable network) is a new network architecture that has been proposed in recent years to solve the lifetime limitation problem of conventional WSNs. Battery-free sensor nodes can harvest energy from environmental energy resources or from artificial power stations. Thus, the lifetime of a BF-WSN is unlimited in terms of energy. The specific properties of BF-WSNs have brought new challenges in fundamental issues, such as energy management, networking, and data acquisition, which means the existing algorithms in WSNs cannot be adopted directly. The BF-WSN can be regarded as a totally new topic in Internet of Things (IoT) and has attracted much attention from researchers. Many algorithms have been proposed to solve the fundamental problems in BF-WSNs. The objective of this survey is to comprehensively summarize and analyze the existing works. In this survey, we first introduce the existing algorithms from three fundamental aspects, including energy management, networking, and data acquisition. Then, we present some specific applications of BF-WSNs.