An Opportunistic Packet Forwarding for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks With Dynamic and Heterogeneous Duty Cycle

In energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs), the energy acquisition is usually insufficient, time varying, and unbalanced. To maintain the nodes working permanently, the duty cycle of nodes should be dynamic and heterogeneous. However, conventional opportunistic packet-forwarding schemes (OPEH) in EH-WSNs do not consider this characteristic when building the relay set and selecting the forwarding paths. Thus, these schemes may have a limited performance. In this article, we consider the impact of the dynamic and heterogeneous duty cycle and propose a novel OPEH for EH-WSNs. Simulation results show that OPEH can significantly reduce the end-to-end delay and improve the packet delivery ratio in EH-WSNs.