  Intensive research on energy harvested sensor nodes with traditional battery
powered devices has been driven by the challenges in achieving the stringent
design goals of battery lifetime, information accuracy, transmission distance,
and cost. This challenge is further amplified by the inherent power intensive
nature of long-range communication when sensor networks are required to span
vast areas such as agricultural fields and remote terrain. Solar power is a
common energy source is wireless sensor nodes, however, it is not reliable due
to fluctuations in power stemming from the changing seasons and weather
conditions. This paper tackles these issues by presenting a
perpetually-powered, energy-harvesting sensor node which utilizes a minimally
sized solar cell and is capable of long range communication by dynamically
co-optimizing energy consumption and information transfer, termed as
Energy-Information Dynamic Co-Optimization (EICO). This energy-information
intelligence is achieved by adaptive duty cycling of information transfer based
on the total amount of energy available from the harvester and charge storage
element to optimize the energy consumption of the sensor node, while employing
in-sensor analytics (ISA) to minimize loss of information. This is the first
reported sensor node < 35cm2 in dimension, which is capable of long-range
communication over > 1Km at continuous information transfer rates of upto 1
packet/second which is enabled by EICO and ISA.
