An energy harvesting aware data dissemination strategy for energy rechargeable wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is often deployed in a harsh or hard-reach area and is required to operate for a long period time to collect and route sensed information. Since each sensor node (later node) is battery-powered, prudent energy-efficient mechanisms have been proposed to extend the network life-time. However, recharging (or replacing) battery is ultimately unavoidable. In this thesis, we consider energy harvesting (or scavenging) with environmental energy sources, such as solar, wind, or vibration. Then we extend the original sensor protocols for information via negotiation (SPIN) and propose an energy harvesting aware data dissemination strategy for energy rechargeable wireless sensor networks, called Green-SPIN. In Green-SPIN, each node intermittently harvests energy and judiciously changes its communication range. We compare the performance of three data dissemination schemes as a function of number of nodes and the communication range through extensive simulation: Flooding, SPIN with broadcast (SPIN-BC), SPIN with reliability (SPIN-RL), and Green-SPIN. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves more data dissemination rate than the SPIN-RL in the low node density and short communication range. Compared to Flooding and SPIN-BC, both proposed scheme and SPIN-RL show two times higher data dissemination rate. The proposed scheme also shows competitive performance with SPIN-RL in high node density and extended communication range. In addition, the proposed scheme transmits similar number of data packets with the SPIN-RL.