Multicore energy efficient scheduling with energy harvesting for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are becoming one of the latest trends in the Internet of things. However, in WMSNs the energy constraint is a significant issue. In this paper, an idea of integrating energy harvesting technique with energy efficient scheduling mechanism is proposed. In order to increase the overall energy efficiency, the previously studied scheduling algorithm is used and integrated with a multi-core processor technique. Since increasing the number of cores in a processor decreases the overall energy efficiency, integration of energy harvesting with the processor can alleviate energy loss. The proposed idea constitutes of implementing the technique of lightweight processor (LWP) on a first core and leaving the second core in idle state with multiple lightweight processor implementation. The second core is divided into two parts namely, the main part and the multiple LWPs. The main part of the second core is used to relieve the processing speed issue and the multiple LWPs are used to cover up the flaws of missing deadlines if the number of tasks are increased. The second core comes in operation when the battery capacity is above 50%, using the RF energy harvesting scheme. This method increases the overall energy efficiency of each sensor node from 38% to 60% compared to the single core and single LWP method.