A Receiver-Initiated MAC Protocol for Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks

摘要

Energy harvesting technology potentially solves the problem of energy efficiency, which is the biggest challenge in wireless sensor networks. The capability of harvesting energy from surrounding environment enables an achievement of infinitive lifetime at a sensor node. The technology promisingly changes the fundamental principle of communication protocols in wireless sensor networks. Instead of saving energy as much as possible, the protocols should keep the efficient operation and maximum performance of networks while guaranteeing the harvested energy is equal or bigger than the consumed energy. In this paper, we propose ERI-MAC a new receiver-initiated MAC protocol for energy harvesting sensor networks. ERI-MAC leverages the benefit of receiver-initiated and packet concatenation to achieve good performance both in latency and energy efficiency. Moreover, ERI-MAC employs a queuing mechanism to adjust the operation of a sensor node following the energy harvesting rate from the surrounding environment. The extensive simulation results in ns-2 show that ERI-MAC achieves good network performance, as well as, enables infinitive lifetime of sensor networks.