Energy-Aware Data Compression and Transmission Range Control Scheme for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Energy-harvesting nodes in wireless sensor networks(WSNs) can be exhausted due to a heavy workload even though they can harvest energy from their environment. On contrast, they can sometimes fully charged, thus waste the harvested energy due to the limited battery-capacity. In order to utilize the harvested energy efficiently, we introduce a selective data compression and transmission range control scheme for energy-harvesting nodes. In this scheme, if the residual energy of a node is expected to run over the battery capacity, the node spends the surplus energy to exploit the data compression or the transmission range expansion; these operations can reduce the burden of intermediate nodes at the expanse of its own energy. Otherwise, the node performs only basic operations such as sensing or transmitting so as to avoid its blackout time. Simulation result verifies that the proposed scheme gathers more data with fewer number of blackout nodes than other schemes by consuming energy efficiently.