The capability to either minimize energy consumption in battery-operated devices, or to adequately exploit energy\nharvesting from various ambient sources, is central to the development and engineering of energy-neutral wireless\nsensor networks. However, the design of effective networked embedded systems targeting unlimited lifetime poses\nseveral challenges at different architectural levels. In particular, the heterogeneity, the variability, and the\nunpredictability of many energy sources, combined to changes in energy required by powered devices, make it\ndifficult to obtain reproducible testing conditions, thus prompting the need of novel solutions addressing these\nissues. This paper introduces a novel embedded hardware-software solution aimed at emulating a wide spectrum of\nenergy sources usually exploited to power sensor networks motes. The proposed system consists of a modular\narchitecture featuring small factor form, low power requirements, and limited cost. An extensive experimental\ncharacterization confirms the validity of the embedded emulator in terms of flexibility, accuracy, and latency while a\ncase study about the emulation of a lithium battery shows that the hardware-software platform does not introduce\nany measurable reduction of the accuracy of the model. The presented solution represents therefore a convenient\nsolution for testing large-scale testbeds under realistic energy supply scenarios for wireless sensor networks.
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