Wireless Sensor Network using Energy Harvesting

Energy harvesting has been studied as a candidate for powering next generation wireless sensor networks. Ambient energy sources that can be harvested to power sensors include solar, vibration, heat and wind. However, sensor nodes powered by energy harvesting devices cannot always communicate with other nodes because the energy harvesting devices of the same footprint as sensor are unable to provide a stable supply of energy.
We have proposed two data collection protocols for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks called the Probabilistic ReTransmission protocol (PRT) and PRT with Collision Consideration (PRT-CC). The idea is to derive the number of times to retransmit a packet based on the reception probability and the active intervals computed by the receivers themselves while, in PRT-CC, each node computes the reception probability with packet collision consideration. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocols are able to achieve higher delivery ratio than the previous works.