Towards Improved Lifespan for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review of Energy Harvesting Technologies and Strategies

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have largely integrated all areas, including the military and civil fields. Their main limitation is their energy resources, which are very limited. Charging or replacing their batteries is often complicated or impossible, due to the high costs involved. The development of new approaches to energy management techniques for these autonomous systems has identified two strategic categories of energy management classification. The first category "Software" targets the development of algorithms for routing protocols to make transmissions smarter and more energy-efficient. The second category "Hardware", focused more on new energy recovery technologies, has drawn the attention of academicians and industrialists because they bring a new manner of energy storage with life extension performance. Furthermore, this category has inspired new ways of supporting WSN administered applications such as real-time processes. In this paper, we review different current sources of Energy Harvesting Technologies and Strategies with WSN (EHTS-WSN) and their various areas of applications. Our review provided a current analysis and future prospects for energy harvesting purposes in WSN. Hence, we propose that it would be required to ensure a compromise that combined the ''Software'' and ''Hardware'' designs of WSN in order to optimize energy consumption and therefore the lifetime of the network.