Early Scavenger Dimensioning in Wireless Industrial Monitoring Applications

The industrial Internet era is pushing for even more miniaturized, powerful, and energy efficient devices that seamlessly integrate to the Internet and aim to improve efficiency of industries by monitoring, actuating, or sampling data from machines, infrastructures, and systems. Industrial low power wireless protocols are one of the key enablers of that revolution but still energy consumption is what is limiting ubiquitous deployments of perpetual and unattended devices. The adoption of energy harvesting technologies is enabling autonomously powered control and monitoring systems on industries, infrastructures, and cities. Yet, putting these systems together require a clear understanding of their capabilities and behavior in order to dimension their energy needs and to contribute to the development of a new generation of self-powered ubiquitous devices. Therefore, this paper discusses, through a use case, the tradeoff to reliably dimension scavenger properties to network requirements and application needs, with the main objective to enable industries to optimize the adoption of that technologies while keeping low technical risks.