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