EIF-Export: An energy-interference-free data export approach for EH-WSN Networks

Different to the traditional WSN, the energy harvesting WSN(EH-WSN) harvests energy from environment that greatly prolongs its lifetime. Since the communication and routing protocols are very sensitive to energy, and the power supply of EH-WSN is intermittent, it brings quite a challenge for debugging the EH-WSN network. To avoid interfering nodes energy, EH-WSN network debugging is required of energy-interference-free, and nodes are managed to supply energy intermittently. Moreover, the debugger for traditional WSN is not available in EH-WSN networks, and the existing debugger for EH-WSN is only applicable for any single node, failure to obtain the whole information of networks. Accordingly, in this paper, we designed an energy-interference-free data export device for EH-WSN networks (EIF-Export), including hardware and software, which is possible to export the internal data of nodes without affecting nodes operation. Taking into account of the low cost of the device, it is possible to attach a EIF-Export on each of EH-WSN nodes, and the data is collected for further analysis, achieving monitoring for the whole networks. Equipped with LCD, EIF-Export displays key values directly, and the network state is clear and intuitive in visual. EIF-Export, not a debugger, is capable to debug the whole EH-WSN network by obtaining a large scale of data that debuggers are not possible to do. Experiments show that EIF-Export only consumes energy of 8.66nJ/Byte, thus this approach achieves the energy-interference-free data export basically, having no interference to nodes energy and network operation.