HANS: Harvesting aware networking service for energy management in wireless sensor networks

Large scale deployments of small, wireless, networked, embedded systems demand for cost reduction in development and maintenance. Most often, this translates into the need for reliable methods for energy conservation as it is the case for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Our work considers energy harvesting system (EHS)-enhanced WSN technology which is the state-of-the-art technology for perpetual systems supplied from ambient environmental energy. Therefore several aspects have been considered in literature so far: EHS design, energy prediction modeling, harvesting aware media access control (MAC) and routing and finally power management. This paper postulates that identifying and optimizing these aspects on their own does not necessarily lead to feasible solutions. We take a cross-layer perspective and provide a networking protocol for implicit or explicit EHS policy negotiation under the constraint of two prototypical communication patterns. The methods presented show how to combine energy aware routing or conservation from network coding with EHS power management policies under the constraint of state-of-the-art MAC. Evaluation of different end-user communication patterns lets the reader interpret the results for an application at hand.