Romeli Barbosa

Optimal Sizing of a Photovoltaic-Hydrogen Power System for HALE Aircraft by means of Particle Swarm Optimization

Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in the research of feasibility to use high altitude long endurance (HALE) aircrafts in order to provide mobile communications. The use of HALEs for telecommunication networks has the potential to deliver a wide range of communication services (from high-quality voice to high-definition videos, as well as high-data-rate wireless channels) cost effectively. One of the main challenges of this technology is to design its power supply system, which must provide the enough energy for long time flights in a reliable way. In this paper a photovoltaic/hydrogen system is proposed as power system for a HALE aircraft due its high power density characteristic. In order to obtain the optimal sizing for photovoltaic/hydrogen system a particle swarm optimizer (PSO) is used. As a case study, theoretical design of the photovoltaic/hydrogen power system for three different HALE aircrafts located at 18° latitude is presented. At this latitude, the range of solar radiation intensity was from 310 to 450 Wh/sqm/day. The results obtained show that the photovoltaic/hydrogen systems calculated by PSO can operate during one year with efficacies ranging between 45.82% and 47.81%. The obtained sizing result ensures that the photovoltaic/hydrogen system supplies adequate energy for HALE aircrafts.

PEAL: Power Efficient and Adaptive Latency Hierarchical Routing Protocol for Cluster-Based WSN

In wireless sensor networks, one of the most important constraints is the low power consumption requirement. For that reason, several hierarchical or cluster-based routing methods have been proposed to provide an efficient way to save energy during communication. However, their main challenge is to have efficient mechanisms to achieve the trade-off between increasing the network lifetime and accomplishing acceptable transmission latency. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol for cluster-based wireless sensor networks called PEAL (Power Efficient and Adaptive Latency). Our simulation results show that PEAL can extend the network lifetime about 47% compared to the classic protocol LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) and introduces an acceptable transmission latency compared to the energy conservation gain.