Bounded end-to-end delay with Transmission Power Control techniques for rechargeable wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Due to sporadic availability of energy, a fundamental problem in rechargeable wireless sensor networks is nodes have to adjust their duty cycles continuously. On the other hand, the energy harvested from surrounding environment usually is not enough to power sensor nodes continually. Therefore, the nodes have to operate in a very low duty cycle. These unique characteristics cause packet delivery latency is critical in Rechargeable WSNs. At the same time, energy storage device of a node is always limited. Hence, the node cannot be always beneficial to conserve energy when a network can harvest excessive energy from the environment. In this work, we introduce a scheme by improving transmission power of nodes to bound E2E delay. We provide an algorithm for finding the minimal sleep latency from a node to a sink by increasing minimal h number of nodes whose transmission power improved. For bounding E2E delay from source node to the sink, we propose an E2E delay maintenance solution. Through extensive simulation and experiments, we demonstrate our delay bound maintenance scheme is efficient to provide E2E delay guarantees in rechargeable wireless sensor networks.