A Routing Protocol Based on Power Generation Pattern of Sensor Node in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, energy harvesting from ambient energy sources, including solar and vibrational energy, has been investigated as a candidate for powering next-generation wireless sensor networks. However, unlike a battery-powered network, power supplementation of energy harvesting is unstable. Therefore, when a node sends data, the relay nodes are not always available for receiving or transmitting. A node with a high transmission frequency may spend much longer in the energy charging state due to the rapid exhaustion of energy, which results in much more data loss. In order to address this problem, the Relay Traffic-based Transmission Power Control (RT-TPC) transmission power control algorithm has been proposed. However, the algorithm does not consider the power generation pattern of each sensor node. In the present paper, we propose a routing protocol based on the power generation pattern of the sensor node. In the proposed protocol, each sensor node sends its power generation pattern to backward relay nodes at constant intervals. Then, the nodes which are presumed to be unavailable based on the pattern information are excluded as relay node candidates, and a higher delivery ratio can be achieved. A performance evaluation reveals that the proposed protocols can achieve a higher delivery ratio than the standard RT-TPC algorithm.