Research on the data stacking problem of energy-based packet prioritization in EH-WSN

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy constraint is a long-standing problem. With the development of energy-harvesting technology, energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs) have emerged. However, energy-harvesting wireless sensor nodes can be affected by their factors or external factors, making the energy collected by the nodes unequal. When individual nodes run out of energy in advance, the data will not be forwarded to the next hop node normally, thus generating data accumulation. To address this problem, this paper proposes a packet priority-based MAC protocol (DPP-MAC) for EH-WSN, which consists of two main parts: (1) Research on the channel allocation algorithm based on the remaining energy of nodes to avoid data accumulation during the transmission of data by low- energy nodes; (2) Stacking data transmission algorithm based on packet priority to solve the problem of node data stacking and improve network performance. By comparing with the existing MAC algorithm in terms of network throughput packet loss rate, average end-to-end delay, and channel utilization, it is found that the proposed DPP-MAC improves the network performance and better solves the data buildup problem.