Energy Neutral Routing for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, energy harvesting techniques have made it possible to overcome the energy resource limitation suffered by traditional Wireless Sensor Networks. In particular, it is now possible for the network to operate perpetually if sufficient energy is harvested to replenish the energy that is being consumed. Hence the need to prolong network lifetime is no longer the primary objective for the design of network routing protocols. Instead, the aim now is to maintain the network in a Energy Neutral state under which a certain performance level can be maintained perpetually. In this paper we propose a routing protocol, which we refer to as the Energy Neutral Routing (ENR) Protocol, that is able to achieve this objective. ENR also provides fair distribution of traffic loads and it is able to guarantee a linear bound on the total number of communication control messages exchanged, which in turn improves the overall distinct packet delivery ratio. Empirical studies are carried out to evaluate and compare the performance of ENR against other routing protocols.