| Abstract |
The development of the emerging Smart Cities concept aims to enhance city infrastructures and services via the capabilities offered by information and communication technologies (ICT). One of the Smart City main pillars is Smart Mobility. Improvements to the existing physical transportation infrastructure are necessary, to accommodate safety and efficiency. This paper provides a technical overview regarding energy harvesting and packaging issues of the European Horizon 2020 funded project on Safe and green Sensor Technologies for self-explaining and forgiving Road Interactive aPplications (SAFE STRIP). In particular, it focuses on the integration of a number of on-road entities, named as On Road Units (ORU), into an intelligent road tapes/markers in order to improve road surface condition monitoring, traffic and safety. Even though ORU consists of multiple modules (ambient condition sensors, traffic sensors, communication, etc.), here we choose to discuss critical aspects regarding energy provisioning and harvesting, and packaging of this particular system. Particularly, besides primary and secondary batteries, we incorporate solar and piezoelectric harvesters as well as wireless charging receivers and antennas, while all of them co-exist under a hierarchical schema. Finally, we provide a design and implementation study, while results from a number of simulations are also outlined. © 2019 IEEE. |
