Opportunistic Communication with Latency Guarantees for Intermittently-Powered Devices

Energy-harvesting wireless sensor nodes have found widespread adoption due to their low cost and small form factor. However, uncertainty in the available power supply introduces significant challenges in engineering communications between intermittently-powered nodes. We propose a constraint-based model for energy harvests that together with a hardware model can be used to enable consistent, opportunistic communication with worst-case latency guarantees. We show that greedy approaches that attempt communication whenever energy is available lead to prolonged latencies in real-world environments. Our approach offers bounded worst-case latency while providing a performance improvement over a conservative, offline approach planned around the worst-case energy harvest.