Link Scheduling in Rechargeable Wireless Sensor Networks With Imperfect Battery and Memory Effects

This paper considers the novel problem of deriving a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) link schedule for rechargeable wireless sensor networks (rWSNs). Unlike past works, it considers: (i) the energy harvesting time of nodes, (ii) a battery cycle constraint that is used to overcome so called memory effects, and (iii) battery imperfections, i.e., leakage. This paper shows analytically that the battery cycle constraint and leaking batteries lead to unscheduled links. Further, it presents a greedy heuristic that schedules links according to when their corresponding nodes have sufficient energy. Our simulations show that enforcing the battery cycle constraint increases the link schedule by up to 1.71 (0.31) times for nodes equipped with a leaking (leak-free) battery. When nodes have a leaking battery, the derived schedules are on average 1.05 times longer than the case where nodes have a leak-free battery. Finally, the battery cycle constraint reduces the number of charge/discharge cycles by up to 47.41% (45.67)% when nodes have a leak (leak-free) battery. Between leak-free and leak battery scenarios, using the former produces up to 51.46% fewer cycles than the latter.