Information Age and Packet Loss Performance Analysis of Energy Harvesting WSNs

In this paper, we propose a status monitoring strategy by an energy harvesting sensor node that i) harvests energy, ii) collects data, iii) estimates the channel state, and iv) decides whether to perform or defer data delivery to a sink. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we consider the packet loss and the information age metrics and we analytically derive their statistics. Both mathematical analysis and simulations show that, despite the time and energy costs associated, estimating the channel state allows to intelligently manage the harvested energy by avoiding erroneous transmissions. Thereby, it significantly reduces the packet loss and the information age. We also asymptotically obtain the necessary conditions under which the proposed scheme performs strictly better than transmitting without estimating the channel state.