Performance of sensor-MAC in an energy harvesting environment

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks has been an important area of research due to its wide and varied applications, especially in environmental and health monitoring. Most of the earlier work was focused on reducing the energy consumption in order to ensure long life of the network. Duty Cycling is one of the popular methods to achieve this. However, with the growing availability of energy harvesting solutions suitable for WSNs there is a renewed interest in optimizing performance of WSNs. In this work we analyze the performance of SMAC, one of the widely used MACs for WSNs with respect to the energy consumed. The energy consumption is compared with typical solar energy harvested. Based on the study we conclude that the protocol needs to be adaptable in terms of duty cycle based operation in order to effectively utilize the harvested energy.