Battery sensing for energy-aware system design

As portable electronic devices become ever more useful, developers have begun to envision rich pervasive computing environments and instrumentation systems in the form of wireless sensor networks. Unfortunately, energy supply and storage technology are not advancing at the same rate. Whereas computer processor speed and memory capacity have exhibited an orders-of-magnitude increase since the 1990s, battery energy density has only tripled. Making these devices function properly and for as long as possible using only limited power resources has become critical. Research on state-of-charge, or the remaining energy in the batteries, is of key importance. Whereas previous work on battery modeling described how to model batteries using parameterized state-of-charge measurements, the authors propose commercial devices for each parameter that designers can adopt in real applications where fuel gauging is needed.