Design and performance analysis of MAC schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks Powered by Ambient Energy Harvesting

Abstract

a b s t r a c tEnergy consumption is a perennial issue in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which typically rely on portable sources like batteries for power. Recent advances in ambient energy harvesting technology have made it a potential and promising alternative source of energy for powering WSNs. By using energy harvesters with supercapacitors, WSNs are able to operate perpetually until hardware failure and in places where batteries are hard or impossible to replace. In this paper, we study the performance of different medium access control (MAC) schemes based on CSMA and polling techniques for WSNs which are solely powered by ambient energy harvesting using energy harvesters. We base the study on (i) network throughput (S), which is the rate of sensor data received by the sink, (ii) fairness index (F), which determines whether the bandwidth is allocated to each sensor node equally and (iii) inter-arrival time (c) which measures the average time difference between two packets from a source node. For CSMA, we compare both the slotted and unslotted variants. For polling, we first consider identity polling. Then we design a probabilistic polling protocol that takes into account the unpredictability of the energy harvesting process to achieve good performance. Finally, we present an optimal polling MAC protocol to determine the theoretical maximum performance. We validate the analytical models using extensive simulations incorporating experimental results from the characterization of different types of energy harvesters. The performance results show that probabilistic polling achieves high throughput and fairness as well as low inter-arrival times.

RF-MAC: A Medium Access Control Protocol for Re-Chargeable Sensor Networks Powered by Wireless Energy Harvesting

“…We evaluate the RF-MAC-opt against RF-MAC-no-opt in order to investigate the effectiveness of the joint spectrum-ET selection feature incorporated in our RF-MAC protocol, especially in avoiding energy interference and improving the network performance. Finally, the modified CSMA is adapted from [4], which provides the baseline for our performance evaluations. To have a fair baseline comparison, the modified CSMA (in which each sensor node may issue the RFEs and receive the CFEs) is compared against both RF-MAC-opt and RF-MAC-no-opt.…”

“…MAC protocols that aim for energy conservation have been extensively explored in the recent past, with a comprehensive classification and survey on this topic presented in [4], [14], [16], [19]. In this section, we review the related MAC protocols for energy harvesting sensor networks.…”

“…In [4], a pollingbased medium access mechanism (PP-MAC) is described for single-hop sensor networks, which uses the charge-and-spend paradigm for harvesting strategy. In [15], we model a CSMAbased MAC protocol with an ARQ error control mechanism for energy harvesting sensor networks through an analytical framework leveraging stochastic semi-Markov models.…”

Extending the Functionality of Pymote: Low Level Protocols and Simulation Result Analysis

“…We consider Internet of Things (IoT) application scenario where an energy [14] harvesting WSN (EHWSN) node is installed/embedded within the 'Thing' (object that need to be monitored). Several of such objects with EHWSN nodes form a cluster (in virtual star topology)…”

Joint power-QoS control scheme for energy harvesting body sensor nodes

“…In the field of WSNs, some authors have developed MAC protocols to reduce the effect of the energy gap of nodes due to EH [8][9][10][11]. This is because the choice of medium access mechanism is the main factor that determines the network consumption [9].…”