WHARP: A Wake-Up Radio and Harvesting-Based Forwarding Strategy for Green Wireless Networks

Green wireless networks are characterized by devices that are pervasively deployed and that harvest energy from the surrounding environment. Devices are also endowed with low-power triggering techniques (e.g., wake-up radios) to obviate costly idle communication times. In this paper, we present a novel data forwarding strategy for green wireless networks that fully exploits the self-powered wake-up radio capabilities of the network nodes. The proposed strategy, named WHARP for Wake-up and HARvesting-based energy-Predictive forwarding, sends data to their destination by making decentralized and proactive decisions based on forecast energy and expected traffic. The performance of WHARP has been compared to that of the Energy Harvesting Wastage-Aware (EHWA) strategy through GreenCastalia-based simulations. Results show that our approach delivers up to 72% more packets, 1.6 times faster, and consuming 58% less energy than EHWA. This is obtained through a learned selection of forwarder relays allowing WHARP nodes to be operational 98% of the time: A 30% improvement over EHWA.