Towards enabling uninterrupted long-term operation of solar energy harvesting embedded systems

Abstract In this work we describe a systematic approach to power subsystem capacity planning for solar energy harvesting embedded systems, such that unin-terrupted, long-term (i.e., multiple years) operation at a predefined performance level may be achieved. We propose a power subsystem capacity planning algo-rithm based on a modified astronomical model to approximate the harvestable energy and compute the required battery capacity for a given load and harvesting setup. The energy availability model takes as input the deployment site’s latitude, the panel orientation and inclination angles, and an indication of expected meteo-rological and environmental conditions. We validate the model’s ability to predict the harvestable energy with power measurements of a solar panel. Through sim-ulation with 10 years of solar traces from three different geographical locations and four harvesting setups, we demonstrate that our approach achieves 100% availability at up to 53 % smaller batteries when compared to the state-of-the-art