Effects of energy harvesting on quality-of-service in transient wireless sensor networks

The quality-of-service (QoS) metrics in a wireless sensor network (WSN) of multiple sensor types depend on the performance of the network protocol layers, motivating a comprehensive cross-layer design approach to optimize QoS. Advances in energy-harvesting techniques enable increases in WSN lifetime by prolonging operation of the wireless nodes. While the primary objective of energy harvesting is to prolong network lifetime, it may cause lower values of other QoS metrics during that lifetime. From the author's previous work, cross-layer protocol interactions are represented through a set of concatenated parameters and resource levels for a real-time WSN under energy harvesting (EH-WSN). The cross-layer parameters that determine QoS values in the EH-WSN are established in terms of solutions to stochastic dynamic programming conditions derived from multivariate point-process (MVPP) models of transient information flows. Simulation results evaluate the extent to which QoS values are degraded in an EH-WSN compared to a WSN of the same structure without energy harvesting.