Probabilistic data collection protocols for energy harvesting sensor networks

Abstract

Energy harvesting has been studied as a candidate for powering next generation wireless sensor networks. The technologies that can harvest electric power from ambient energy sources include solar, vibration, heat and wind. However, sensor nodes powered by energy harvesting devices cannot always communicate with other nodes because the energy harvesting devices cannot provide a stable supply power. A node cannot know whether its neighboring nodes have enough energy to receive a data packet that it has transmitted. During the process of relaying the packet, each additional hop increases the overall probability of losing the packet. In this paper, we propose two data collection protocols for the energy harvesting wireless sensor networks called Probabilistic ReTransmission protocol (PRT) and PRT with Collision Consideration (PRT-CC). The idea is to derive the number of times to retransmit a packet based on the reception probability and the active intervals computed by the receivers themselves. In PRT-CC, each node computes the reception probability with packet collision consideration. The simulation results show that the proposed protocols achieve higher delivery ratio than the previous works (GR-DD and GR-DD-RT). © 2011 IEEE.