Opportunistic Routing and Data Dissemination Protocol for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recent advances in environmental sources harvesting technologies is a promising solution to provide sustainable energy sources for wireless sensor networks (WSN). Renewable energy sources such as solar, thermal and electromagnetic waves constitute viable alternatives to maximize the network lifetime. Therefore, networking software awareness and adaptability to energy availability conditions should translate into innovative supporting features for data gathering, aggregation, routing and dissemination. Thus, it is paramount to develop robust energy harvesting-aware networking platforms that support the above services and guarantee low energy consumption and data integrity in a noisy, constrained environment. In this paper, we present an opportunistic routing and data dissemination protocol for energy harvesting wireless sensor network (EH-WSN) based on cross-layer constructs that allows across the layers synchronization and coordination between the routing protocol and the application layer services. The OMNET++ based extensive simulation of this protocol showed promising results in terms of meeting application requirements of handling urgent traffic and delay tolerant traffic seamlessly and ensuring energy usage efficiency.