A Routing Protocol for Solar Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy and lifetime issues are crucial to the wide applications of wireless sensor networks. This paper proposes a routing protocol, SEHRP (Solar Energy Harvesting Routing Protocol), for solar energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. This protocol classifies all the sensor nodes into various regions for which each region has been assigned its transmission priority, and the data can only be delivered from lower priority regions to higher priority region. SEHRP can also detect the sensor nodes which are under the charging state, then avoid choosing those charging nodes to ensure the successful data delivery. Simulation results show that, compared to the baseline protocol, SEHRP can achieve significant performance improvements in terms of average energy consumption and average data delivery rate.