Wake-up Radio-enabled Routing for Green Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we present GREENROUTES, an energyaware routing protocol for Energy Harvesting-based ("green") Wireless Sensor Networks that leverages self-powered technologies for eliminating the need of energy storage device replacement. GREENROUTES combines energy harvesting and wake-up radios with semantic addressing. Semantic addressing capabilities are effectively used to enhance communication by allowing nodes to selectively wake-up a suitable subset of neighboring nodes. This subset is determined by the distance of nodes from the sink, and, greedily, by the residual energy along routes to the sink. The performance of GREENROUTES has been compared to that of the Energy Harvest Wastage-Aware (EHWA) routing solution in scenarios where all nodes harvest energy from the same source, either sun or wind. Results show that GREENROUTES achieves a packet delivery ratio significantly higher (up to 40%) than EHWA, while delivering packets faster and for less power.