The Smaller the Better: Designing Solar Energy Harvesting Sensor Nodes for Long-Range Monitoring

Abstract EN

Emerging Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) represent a real breakthrough for monitoring applications, since they give the possibility to generate and transmit data over dozens of kilometers while consuming few energy.

To further increase the autonomy of such wireless systems, the present paper proposes an original methodology to correctly dimension the key elements of an energy autonomous node, namely, the supercapacitor and the battery that mainly give the form factor of the node.

Among the LPWAN candidates, LoRa is chosen for real field experiments with a custom wireless platform that proves its energy neutrality over a finite horizon.

Different LoRa configurations are explored, leading to adequate dimensioning.

As an example, it is shown that, for the same quality of service, the size of the solar panel needed to keep a LoRa node autonomous in the South of France is less than half of the size required in North of France.