Distributed Networking in Autonomic Solar Powered Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recent advances in solar harvesting technologies pave the way for sustainable environmental-monitoring applications in the emerging solar powered wireless sensor networks (SP-WSNs). The complexities associated with the low-resourced, highly-dynamic, and vulnerable sensor nodes operating in potentially unattended or hostile environments require a high degree of self-management and automation. Guided by autonomic communication principles, this paper presents AutoSP-WSN, a novel distributed framework to achieve sustainable data collection while also optimizing end-to-end network performance for SP-WSNs. Initially, we present the energy-aware support component that provides reliable energy monitoring and prediction. This drives the power management component, which is adaptive to time-varying solar power, avoiding battery exhaustion as well as maximizing the per-node utility. Finally, to demonstrate the key design issues of the network protocol component, we propose two self-adaptive network protocols, a routing protocol SP-BCP and a rate control scheme PEA-DLEX. We show that the individual components seamlessly highly integrate as a whole, and the AutoSP-WSN framework exhibits the properties of context-awareness, distributed operation, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-protection and self-healing. Through extensive experiments on a real SP-WSN platform, and hardware-driven simulations, we show that the proposed schemes achieve substantial improvements over previous work, in terms of reliability, sustainable operation, and network utility.