Topology Control for Harvesting Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks: A Design Approach

Abstract

While there has been a lot of research on energy efficient topology control protocols destined for different applications, topology control has never been explored in the presence of harvesting enabled sensors. Largely, researchers in this domain have considered a fixed battery design. We argue that arrival of harvesting enabled sensors necessitates rethink of topology control. The objective of topology control in this context should not be to minimize the spent energy and maintain a reduced topology, but to maximize fault tolerance in the network and increase the sensing coverage region. In this work, we first describe a taxonomy of existing topology control schemes and analyze the impact of reduced topology over fault tolerance and sensing coverage. We then describe the necessity of new design parameters in the presence of harvest-able ambient energy. We also outline guiding principles for designing a harvesting enabled topology control scheme. To cater for whether such a scheme is feasible or not, an insight is also provided onto the solar energy availability from solar radiations for near perpetual operation—as an example of available ambient energy. Based on the insight gained from the solar radiations availability, we explain why new design parameters are required for performance measurement of harvesting enabled sensors. The mathematical and empirical findings reveal that the topology control strategies, which do not take into account harvesting opportunity, are unable to provide better results in terms of fault tolerance and sensing coverage.