Query-Based Sensors Selection for Collaborative Wireless Sensor Networks With Stochastic Energy Harvesting

We develop a new statistical decision making framework to select the optimal subset of sensors to activate, while meeting various quality of service criteria specified by users' queries. The sensor nodes are powered solely by energy harvested from the environment and should be activated in an efficient and economical manner based on the available battery energy, which may not be directly observed by the decision maker. Our decision making framework consists of two aspects: the first is the estimation of the current available battery levels of each of the sensors and the second is a sensor selection policy. The energy estimation step is based on the Cumulative Energy Harvesting Process which is carried out over the collaborative wireless sensor networks. The sensor selection policy is based on the estimated battery levels and uses the Cross-Entropy method which efficiently solves the resulting combinatorial problem to select the sensor set which maximizes the utility function. We demonstrate and provide insights into the robustness and effectiveness of our framework under different operational conditions.