On Virtualizing Targets Coverage in Energy Harvesting IoT Systems

This article considers targets coverage in energy harvesting Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Specifically, solar-powered sensor devices employ network virtualization technology to partition their resources, such as energy, memory, and computation workload, in order to serve requests with different coverage requirements. Our objective is to maximize the revenue from completing requests. To this end, we outline a mixed integer linear program (MILP) to optimize the start time of each request and the set of nodes that serve a request. We also propose a heuristic, called energy harvesting aware request placement (EHARP), to determine requests to be deployed in each time slot based on energy harvesting conditions and the resource state of sensor nodes. Furthermore, we propose two model predictive control (MPC) approaches, called MPC-MILP and MPC-EHARP, respectively, which deploy requests based on energy arrival at devices over a given time window as predicted by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Simulation results show that EHARP, MPC-MILP, and MPC-EHARP are 94.75%, 88.73%, and 87.6% optimal. In addition, the revenue obtained by EHARP is 173.8% higher than a competing approach.