Sleep Scheduling for Unbalanced Energy Harvesting in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy harvesting from ambient energy sources has gained increased attention due to its advantage of less maintenance and for removing the dependency on batteries in IWSNs. However, due to the dynamic nature of ambient energy sources and the position of harvesting nodes, energy-harvesting is not always available, resulting in unbalanced energy-harvesting in IWSNs. Although, some battery operated nodes are used, the limited lifetime problem still exists due to the non-harvesting nodes. In this article, we propose a scheme that combines the advantages of energy-harvesting and sleep-scheduling in hybrid solar energy-harvesting IWSNs and non-harvesting nodes. We present a model of the harvesting-node using a three-state Markov chain. The proposed harvest-use-store type architecture aims to guarantee an energy-neutral condition to avoid energy harvesting nodes from early energy exhaustion. The proposed approach allows to wake up a few more non-harvesting nodes to handle network coverage and connectivity during less-energy-harvesting intervals. Similarly, non-harvesting nodes are allowed to sleep by increasing the default transmission range of the solar-harvesting nodes during higher energy harvesting intervals prolonging network lifetime.