Energy harvesting aware topology control with power adaptation in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, energy harvesting technology has been introduced into wireless sensor networks to solve the traditional battery-powered energy bottleneck problem. However, due to battery capacity limitation, the harvested energy would overflow while the nodes are in the energy saturation status. Aiming at this, we consider topology control approach in the EHWSNs that allows each node to adaptively adjust its transmission power level to utilize the harvested energy efficiently. Specifically, we first model nodes' behaviors as an ordinal potential game where the high harvesting power nodes interact with the low harvesting power nodes to collaboratively maintain the whole network's connectivity. And we theoretically prove the existence of Nash equilibrium in this game. Then, a polynomial-time algorithm has been proposed to achieve Nash equilibrium. Simulation results show that our algorithm exploits the available energy resources in an efficient way and outperforms existing energy-aware algorithm in terms of energy conservation and equilibrium distribution.