Abstract
A technology drift is currently taking place from traditional battery-powered sensor networks, which exhibit limited lifetime, to the new Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSN), which open the way towards self-sustained operation. However, this emergent modality also brings up new challenges, especially due to the time-varying nature and unpredictability of ambient energy sources. Most proposals for implementing EH-WSN rely on heuristic approaches to redesign the duty-cycling mechanism at the MAC layer, with the ultimate goal of optimizing network performance while preserving self-sustained and continuous operation. In contrast to the common system-wide reduced duty cycle of battery-powered sensor networks, the duty cycle in EH-WSN is much larger and adapted to the energy harvesting rate and traffic load of each node in the network. In this paper, we focus on solar-based EH-WSN devoted to environmental monitoring. In contrast to current works, we follow an analytical approach, which results into closed-form expressions for the duty cycle and initial energy storage that guarantee self-sustained operation to any node in a solar-based EH-WSN. To center the analysis, we consider TinyOS sensor nodes, though we postulate that the essential components of the obtained formulation will contribute to further develop duty cycle adaptation schemes for TinyOS and other software platforms.
Highlights
A wireless sensor network is a wireless network of low-cost, low-power and small-in-size multifunctional nodes, which have limited sensing, processing and communicating capabilities and cooperate with each other to relay sensed data from a region of interest to one or multiple sinks.From its emergence in the early nineties, the main design goal faced by researchers in this area has been network lifetime
The default MAC protocol delivered with the TinyOS 2.x release [54,55] for the MicaZ platform, which holds a CC2420 radio [56], consists of an implementation of a protocol known as BoX-MAC [18]
We have obtained closed-form expressions for the duty cycle and initial energy storage that guarantee self-sustained operation in TinyOS solar-based Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSN) devoted to periodic monitoring
Summary
A wireless sensor network is a wireless network of low-cost, low-power and small-in-size multifunctional nodes, which have limited sensing, processing and communicating capabilities and cooperate with each other to relay sensed data from a region of interest to one or multiple sinks. In this paper, we follow an analytical approach, which allows for obtaining closed-form expressions for the duty cycle and initial energy storage that guarantee self-sustained operation at each node. This does contributes to a better understanding the dependence of node duty cycle on energy-related and traffic-related parameters, but we expect that it will result in helping the development of simpler and more effective adaptive schemes for adjusting the duty cycle of nodes. We develop an analytical model for the duty cycle of nodes in terms of relevant parameters describing their traffic load and energy harvesting capability This model results from the formulation of the condition for energy neutral operation and the assumption that solar irradiance follows a periodical pattern.
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