Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks: Delay Analysis Considering Energy Costs of Sensing and Transmission

Energy harvesting (EH) provides a means of greatly enhancing the lifetime of wireless sensor nodes. However, the randomness inherent in the EH process may cause significant delay for performing sensing operation and transmitting the sensed information to the sink. Unlike most existing studies on the delay performance of EH sensor networks, where only the energy consumption of transmission is considered, we consider the energy costs of both sensing and transmission. Specifically, we consider an EH sensor that monitors some status environmental property and adopts a harvest-then-use protocol to perform sensing and transmission. To comprehensively study the delay performance, we consider two complementary metrics and analytically derive their statistics: (i) update age - measuring the time taken from when information is obtained by the sensor to when the sensed information is successfully transmitted to the sink, i.e., how timely the updated information at the sink is, and (ii) update cycle - measuring the time duration between two consecutive successful transmissions, i.e., how frequently the information at the sink is updated. Our results show that the consideration of sensing energy cost leads to an important tradeoff between the two metrics: more frequent updates result in less timely information available at the sink.Comment: submitted for possible journal publicatio

A two-queue model for optimising the value of information in energy-harvesting sensor networks

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Optimal power control in green wireless sensor networks with wireless energy harvesting, wake-up radio and transmission control

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are autonomous networks of spatially distributed sensor nodes which are capable of wirelessly communicating with each other in a multi-hop fashion. Among different metrics, network lifetime and utility and energy consumption in terms of carbon footprint are key parameters that determine the performance of such a network and entail a sophisticated design at different abstraction levels. In this paper, wireless energy harvesting (WEH), wake-up radio (WUR) scheme and error control coding (ECC) are investigated as enabling solutions to enhance the performance of WSNs while reducing its carbon footprint. Specifically, a utility-lifetime maximization problem incorporating WEH, WUR and ECC, is formulated and solved using distributed dual subgradient algorithm based on Lagrange multiplier method. It is discussed and verified through simulation results to show how the proposed solutions improve network utility, prolong the lifetime and pave the way for a greener WSN by reducing its carbon footprint

Kablosuz sensör ağlarinda yönlü antenlerle enerji̇ veri̇mli̇ yönlendi̇rme

Without measurements, sustainable development effort can not progress in the right direction. Wireless sensor networks are vital for monitoring in real time and making accurate measurements for such an endeavor. However small energy storage in the sensors can become a bottleneck if the wireless sensor network is not optimized at the hardware and software level. Directional antennas are such optimization technologies at the hardware level. They have advantages over the omnidirectional antennas, such as high gain, less interference, longer transmission range, and less power consumption. In wireless sensor networks, most of the energy is consumed for communication. Considering the limited energy in small scale batteries of the sensors, energy efficient (aware) routing, is one of the most important software optimization techniques. The main goal of the technique is to improve the lifetime of the wireless sensor networks. In the light of these observations, it is desirable to do a coupled design of directional antennas with network software, for fully exploiting the advantages offered by directional antenna technology. In this thesis, the possibilities of doing such integrated design are surveyed and improvements are suggested. The design of the proposed microstrip patch antenna array is discussed and the performance characteristics are assessed through simulations. In the benchmarks, the proposed routing method showed improvements in energy usage compared to the existing approaches.Ölçümler olmadan sürdürülebilir kalkınma çabaları doğru yönde ilerleyemez. Bu tür çabalar için, kablosuz sensör ağları, gerçek zamanlı olarak izleme ve kesin ölçümler yapmak için vazgeçilemez unsurdur. Ancak, sensör ağı, donanım ve yazılım düzeylerinde optimize edilmemişse, sensörlerde enerji yetersizliği görülebilinir. Yönlü antenler, donanım düzeyinde uygulanan optimizasyon teknolojilerinden biri olmakla birlikte, çok yönlü antenlerden farklı olarak, yüksek kazanç, daha az parazit, daha uzun iletim mesafesi ve daha az güç tüketimi sağlarlar. Kablosuz sensör ağlarında enerjinin çoğu iletişim için tüketilir. Sensörlerdeki limitli enerjili küçük ölçekli piller göz önüne alındığında, yazılım düzeyindeki önemli metodlardan biri olan enerji verimli (duyarlı) yönlendirme protokolü, kablosuz sensör ağının genel enerji kullanımını optimize etmek ve ömrünü uzatmak için gereklidir. Bu gözlemlerin ışığında, yönlü anten teknolojisinin sunduğu potansiyel avantajlardan tam olarak yararlanmak için, yönlü antenlerin ağ yazılımıyla birlikte entegre tasarımını yapmak arzu edilir. Bu tezde, böyle bir entegre tasarımın yapılma olasılıkları araştırılmış ve iyileştirmeler önerilmiştir. Tezde, küçük şeritli yamalı anten dizisinin tasarımı tartışılmış ve performans karakteristikleri simulasyonlarla ölçülmüştür. Önerilen yönlendirme algoritması, diğer yönlendirme algoritmaları ile karşılaştırıldığında, enerji kullanımında iyileştirmeler göstermiştirM.S. - Master of Scienc

Innovative energy-efficient wireless sensor network applications and MAC sub-layer protocols employing RTS-CTS with packet concatenation

of energy-efficiency as well as the number of available applications. As a consequence there are challenges that need to be tackled for the future generation of WSNs. The research work from this Ph.D. thesis has involved the actual development of innovative WSN applications contributing to different research projects. In the Smart-Clothing project contributions have been given in the development of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) to monitor the foetal movements of a pregnant woman in the last four weeks of pregnancy. The creation of an automatic wireless measurement system for remotely monitoring concrete structures was an contribution for the INSYSM project. This was accomplished by using an IEEE 802.15.4 network enabling for remotely monitoring the temperature and humidity within civil engineering structures. In the framework of the PROENEGY-WSN project contributions have been given in the identification the spectrum opportunities for Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting through power density measurements from 350 MHz to 3 GHz. The design of the circuits to harvest RF energy and the requirements needed for creating a WBAN with electromagnetic energy harvesting and Cognitive Radio (CR) capabilities have also been addressed. A performance evaluation of the state-of-the art of the hardware WSN platforms has also been addressed. This is explained by the fact that, even by using optimized Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols, if the WSNs platforms do not allow for minimizing the energy consumption in the idle and sleeping states, energy efficiency and long network lifetime will not be achieved. The research also involved the development of new innovative mechanisms that tries and solves overhead, one of the fundamental reasons for the IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC inefficiency. In particular, this Ph.D. thesis proposes an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer performance enhancement by employing RTS/CTS combined with packet concatenation. The results have shown that the use of the RTS/CTS mechanism improves channel efficiency by decreasing the deferral time before transmitting a data packet. In addition, the Sensor Block Acknowledgment MAC (SBACK-MAC) protocol has been proposed that allows the aggregation of several acknowledgment responses in one special Block Acknowledgment (BACK) Response packet. Two different solutions are considered. The first one considers the SBACK-MAC protocol in the presence of BACK Request (concatenation) while the second one considers the SBACK-MAC in the absence of BACK Request (piggyback). The proposed solutions address a distributed scenario with single-destination and single-rate frame aggregation. The throughput and delay performance is mathematically derived under both ideal conditions (a channel environment with no transmission errors) and non ideal conditions (a channel environment with transmission errors). An analytical model is proposed, capable of taking into account the retransmission delays and the maximum number of backoff stages. The simulation results successfully validate our analytical model. For more than 7 TX (aggregated packets) all the MAC sub-layer protocols employing RTS/CTS with packet concatenation allows for the optimization of channel use in WSNs, v8-48 % improvement in the maximum average throughput and minimum average delay, and decrease energy consumption