A Hybrid Prediction Model for Solar Radiation Based on Long Short-Term Memory, Empirical Mode Decomposition, and Solar Profiles for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

For power management in the energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs), it is necessary to know in advance the collectable solar energy data of each node in the network. Our work aims to improve the accuracy of solar energy predictions. Therefore, several existing prediction algorithms in the literature are surveyed, and then this paper proposes a solar radiance prediction model based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network in combination with the signal processing algorithm empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The EMD method is used to decompose the time sequence data into a series of relatively stable component sequences. For improving the prediction accuracy further by utilizing the current day solar radiation profile in one-hour-ahead predictions, similar solar radiation profile data were selected for training LSTM neural networks. Simulation results show that the hybrid model achieves better prediction performance than traditional prediction methods, such as the exponentially-weighted moving average (EWMA), weather conditioned moving average (WCMA), and only LSTM models.