A review on renewable energy sources, battery replenishment strategies, and application-specific energy challenges of wireless sensor networks

The emergence of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has not only paved the way for sev eral life-easing applications, but also played a vital role in technological advancements. The main factor that has always affected the potential of WSNs is energy. Wireless sensor nodes are mainly powered by traditional batteries, which can only provide a limited capacity. As a consequence, sensor nodes cannot remain operational for a long duration or, in some scenarios, cannot even last for a few months. Furthermore, the compact size of a sensor node does not allow for the use of large but long-lasting bat teries, and replacement of batteries is also not possible in all circumstances. Several models and approaches for prolonging network lifetime have been proposed in the literature. This chapter consolidates such works into a single source. Different replen-ishable energy techniques and power-saving algorithms for wireless sensor networks are also discussed in this chapter