  Industrial wireless sensor networks enable real-time data collection,
analysis, and control by interconnecting diverse industrial devices. In these
industrial settings, power outlets are not always available, and reliance on
battery power can be impractical due to the need for frequent battery
replacement or stringent safety regulations. Battery-less energy harvesters
present a suitable alternative for powering these devices. However, these
energy harvesters, equipped with supercapacitors instead of batteries, suffer
from intermittent on-off behavior due to their limited energy storage capacity.
As a result, they struggle with extended or frequent energy-consuming phases of
multi-hop network formation, such as network joining and synchronization. To
address these challenges, our work proposes three strategies for integrating
battery-less energy harvesting devices into industrial multi-hop wireless
sensor networks. In contrast to other works, our work prioritizes the
mitigation of intermittency-related issues, rather than focusing solely on
average energy consumption, as is typically the case with battery-powered
devices. For each of the proposed strategies, we provide an in-depth discussion
of their suitability based on several critical factors, including the type of
energy source, storage capacity, device mobility, latency, and reliability.
