Title: Probabilistic data collection protocols for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

Authors: Masaya Yoshida; Tomoya Kitani; Masaki Bandai; Takashi Watanabe; Pai H. Chou; Winston K.G. Seah

Addresses: Graduate School of Informatics, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka 432-8011, Japan. ' Division of Global Research Leaders, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka 432-8011, Japan. ' Department of Information and Communication Sciences, Sophia University, 7-1 Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554, Japan. ' Graduate School of Science and Technology, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka 432-8011, Japan. ' Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA. ' School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6140, New Zealand

Abstract: Energy harvesting from ambient energy sources including solar and vibration has been studied as a candidate for powering next generation wireless sensor networks. However, energy harvesting is unstable to supply a sensor node with energy, and a node cannot know whether its neighbouring nodes have enough energy to receive a data packet. In this paper, we propose two data collection protocols for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks called the Probabilistic ReTransmission protocol (PRT) and PRT with Collision Consideration (PRT-CC). The idea is to derive the appropriate number of times to retransmit a packet based on the reception probability and the active intervals computed by the receivers themselves while, in PRT-CC, each node computes the reception probability with packet collision consideration. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocols are able to achieve higher delivery ratio than the previous work, namely, Geographic Routing with Duplicate Detection (GR-DD) and GR-DD with Retransmission.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; next generation WSNs; ambient energy sources; energy harvesting; data collection protocols; probabilistic data collection; reception probability; packet collision; performance evaluation; delivery ratio.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2012.050272

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2012 Vol.11 No.2/3, pp.82 - 96

Received: 28 Jan 2012
Accepted: 02 Jun 2012

Published online: 13 Nov 2012 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article