Multi-Access Edge Computing assisted ultra-low energy scheduling and harvesting in multi-hop Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network for energy neutral self-sustainable Next-gen Cyber-Physical System

Abstract

Energy Neutrality is the need of the hour for future Cyber-physical infrastructure. Many past research works suggest low duty cycle networking for energy-efficient wireless sensor network; however, research problem still persist as these proposals have some practical deployment bottlenecks like sleep-latency and may trade-off with data-fidelity and Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters. The research objective of this work is to propose a novel design for wireless sensor–actuator mote system to minimize energy consumption and compensate with harvesting to achieve energy neutral operation in multi-hop Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN); A network scenario that is much needed for Internet of Thing (IoT) applications in future ready Next-gen Cyber Physical System (NG-CPS). In this paper, we have proposed a novel state-of-the-art Multi-Access/Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) assisted Low-Duty-Cycle Scheduling of Trans-Receiver for Store-Process-Then-Forward (LDCS-TR-SPTF) scheme in multi-hop WSAN for reducing the overall energy consumption. In addition to energy conservation, we have also proposed a hybrid harvesting to compensate energy to achieve energy neutral self-sustainable NG-CPS. The proposed novel LDCS-TR-SPTF has been implemented on multiple custom-made sensor–actuator motes equipped with ARM-based System-on-Chip (SoC) and IEEE 802.11 network interface. These motes are working both as end-nodes and relay nodes in a multi-hop WSAN testbed scenario for testing and validation of our proposed scheme. The results are promising with an overall energy conservation of 49.1% using our novel LDCS-TR-SPTF in comparison to stock IEEE 802.11. We have implemented solar energy harvester on wireless sensor–actuator motes to compensate the reduced energy consumption and achieved complete energy-neutrality. Motes are completely energy-autonomous in multi-hop WSAN scenario by eliminating the need of access to external power-grid for future cyber–physical system.