Maximal Utility Rate Allocation for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

There is currently tremendous interest in deploying energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks. Engineering such systems requires striking a careful balance between sensing performance and energy management. Our work addresses this problem through the design and analysis of a harvesting-aware utility-based sensing rate allocation algorithm. Based on a network utility formulation, we show that our algorithm is optimal in terms of assigning rates to individual nodes to maximize overall utility, while ensuring energy-neutral operation. To our knowledge, our work is the first optimal solution that maximizes network utility through rate assignments for tree-structured energy harvesting sensor networks. Our algorithm is fast and efficient with running time O(N~3), where N is the number of nodes. We evaluate the performance, scalability, and overhead of our algorithm for various utility functions and network sizes, underlining its significant advantages.