Efficient Wind Speed Forecasting for Resource-Constrained Sensor Devices

Wind energy harvesting technology is one of the most popular power sources for wireless sensor networks. However, given its irregular nature, wind energy availability experiences significant variations and, therefore, wind-powered devices need reliable forecasting models to effectively adjust their energy consumption to the dynamics of energy harvesting. On the other hand, resource-constrained devices with limited hardware capacities (such as sensor nodes) must resort to forecasting schemes of low complexity for their predictions in order to avoid squandering their scarce power and computing capabilities. In this paper, we present a new efficient ARIMA-based forecasting model for predicting wind speed at short-term horizons. The performance results obtained using real data sets show that the proposed ARIMA model can be an excellent choice for wind-powered sensor nodes due to its potential for achieving accurate enough predictions with very low computational burden and memory overhead. In addition, it is very simple to setup, since it can dynamically adapt to varying wind conditions and locations without requiring any particular reconfiguration or previous data training phase for each different scenario.