RF power harvesting and enhancing throughput in a optical link based sensor network

Abstract

Energy is one of the most important constraint inWireless Sensor Network (WSN), all the existing protocols, architectures revolve around the power plane. As the sensor network scale, their feasibility of implementation depends on its maintenance. The main aspect in maintenance of a WSN is the replacement of power sources. In the recent times, as implied applications of WSN grow, focus was more on running WSN on alternate sources of energy enabling longevity of sensor node. Here a system for harvesting radio frequency for an optical link based sensor network is developed using state of the art harvesting and storage technologies to be deployed inside a Tokamak.

In multimedia based sensor network where optical link is used for communication, the data has to be encoded to enhance the data rate and increase the throughput. A multiple access scheme is developed over the existing infrared protocol for throughput enhancement with increased data rate using the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) protocol and hardware encoder.