Performance of an Autonomous Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor

While complex autonomic self-organising systems have received much attention, simple autonomous systems are also needed for remote sensing applications, as well as for the Internet of Things. Such autonomous stand-alone unattended devices may not have access to reliable sources of mains power, and will have to harvest energy locally from ambient sources such as vibrations, heat or light. However energy leakage will also be a problem. This paper proposes a mathematical model to analyse the performance of such systems in the presence of a random source of energy, as well as a random source of data. The equilibrium between random energy, random data and random leakage results in an interesting performance analysis of these small but ubiquitous systems as a whole. A discussion is also provided about the effect of transmission errors.