TY - JOUR
T1 - Medium access control protocols for wireless sensor networks with energy harvesting
AU - Iannello, Fabio
AU - Simeone, Osvaldo
AU - Spagnolini, Umberto
N1 - Funding Information:
The work of O. Simeone was partially supported by U.S. NSF under grant CCF-0914899. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCOMM.2012.030712.110089
PY - 2012/5
Y1 - 2012/5
N2 - The design of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been conventionally tackled by assuming battery-powered devices and by adopting the network lifetime as the main performance criterion. While WSNs operated by energy-harvesting (EH) devices are not limited by network lifetime, they pose new design challenges due to the uncertain amount of energy that can be harvested from the environment. Novel design criteria are thus required to capture the trade-offs between the potentially infinite network lifetime and the uncertain energy availability. This paper addresses the analysis and design of WSNs with EH devices by focusing on conventional MAC protocols, namely TDMA, framed-ALOHA (FA) and dynamic-FA (DFA), and by accounting for the performance trade-offs and design issues arising due to EH. A novel metric, referred to as delivery probability, is introduced to measure the capability of a MAC protocol to deliver the measurement of any sensor in the network to the intended destination (or fusion center, FC). The interplay between delivery efficiency and time efficiency (i.e., the data collection rate at the FC), is investigated analytically using Markov models. Numerical results validate the analysis and emphasize the critical importance of accounting for both delivery probability and time efficiency in the design of EH-WSNs.
AB - The design of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been conventionally tackled by assuming battery-powered devices and by adopting the network lifetime as the main performance criterion. While WSNs operated by energy-harvesting (EH) devices are not limited by network lifetime, they pose new design challenges due to the uncertain amount of energy that can be harvested from the environment. Novel design criteria are thus required to capture the trade-offs between the potentially infinite network lifetime and the uncertain energy availability. This paper addresses the analysis and design of WSNs with EH devices by focusing on conventional MAC protocols, namely TDMA, framed-ALOHA (FA) and dynamic-FA (DFA), and by accounting for the performance trade-offs and design issues arising due to EH. A novel metric, referred to as delivery probability, is introduced to measure the capability of a MAC protocol to deliver the measurement of any sensor in the network to the intended destination (or fusion center, FC). The interplay between delivery efficiency and time efficiency (i.e., the data collection rate at the FC), is investigated analytically using Markov models. Numerical results validate the analysis and emphasize the critical importance of accounting for both delivery probability and time efficiency in the design of EH-WSNs.
KW - Dynamic framed ALOHA
KW - Energy harvesting
KW - Multiaccess communication
KW - Wireless sensor networks
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U2 - 10.1109/TCOMM.2012.030712.110089
DO - 10.1109/TCOMM.2012.030712.110089
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84861188162
SN - 0090-6778
VL - 60
SP - 1381
EP - 1389
JO - IEEE Transactions on Communications
JF - IEEE Transactions on Communications
IS - 5
M1 - 6168187
ER -