Energy harvesting based opportunistic routing for mobile wireless nanosensor networks

Abstract

Wireless nanosensor networks (WNSN) are new type of networks that combing nanotechnology and sensor network. Aiming at the mobility problem and the energy limitation of nanonodes, a mobile WNSN opportunistic routing protocol (MWOR) based on energy harvesting is proposed. In the protocol, a piezoelectric nano energy harvesting system is introduced to break the energy bottleneck. Then the protocol establishes a new routing metric model based on the ETX measure, a node motion vector model is introduced to reflect the mobility of node, and a node survivability model is added to reflect the energy harvesting feature of the nanonodes. Simulation results show that this protocol can realize self-powered nanosensors and perpetual wireless nanosensor networks. And it has advantages in transmission success rate, energy consumption balance and effective throughput, and can be applied to mobile WNSN.