Vibrational-Powered Vehicle's Mesh Wireless Sensor Network: Performance Evaluation

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) powered by an Energy Harvesting (EH) system, known as EH-WSN are increasingly seen as the appropriate monitoring medium for environments for which, wired connections can be troublesome. This is, for example, the case of the vehicles in which many sensors are increasingly incorporated, thus resulting in a significant number of wired connections. In this paper, the vibrational-powered vehicle's sensors, through piezoelectric transducers is considered. The design method presented here is to enslave the sensor node to the amount of the extracted energy from mechanical vibrations. The piezoelectric transducer is modeled with Simscape tool of Matlab/Simulink software. The characteristics of vibrations detected in a vehicle are used as simulation parameters. The energy budget of a sensor node is quantified and used to evaluate the performance of the autonomous WSN. The range of the WSN is used as a performance metric. A maximum distance of 327 m is obtained for two sensor nodes which exchange information every 10 min. This is a promising result that can be applied in Vehicular Adhoc NETwork (VANET) to improve driving safety.