Energy Synchronized Transmission Control for Energy-harvesting Sensor Networks

Energy harvesting and recharging techniques have been regarded as a promising solution to ensure sustained operations of wireless sensor networks for long-term applications. To deal with the diversity of energy harvesting and constrained energy storage capability, sensor nodes in such applications usually work in a duty-cycled mode. Consequently, the sleep latency brought by duty-cycled operation is becoming the main challenge. In this work, we study the energy synchronization control problem for such sustainable sensor networks. Intuitively, energy-rich nodes can increase their transmission power in order to improve network performance, while energy-poor nodes can lower transmission power to conserve its precious energy resource. In particular, we propose an energy synchronized transmission control scheme (ESTC) by which each node adaptively selects suitable power levels and data forwarders according to its available energy and traffic load. Based on the large-scale simulations, we validate that our design can improve system performance under different network settings comparing with common uniform transmission power control strategy. Specially, ESTC can enable the perpetual operations of nodes without sacrificing the network lifetime.