Reliable Lifetime Assessment for Routing in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network with Energy Harvesting Nodes Placement

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) comprise of small sensor nodes powered by batteries/supercapacitors. These sensor nodes work collaboratively using wireless communication. WSN is an important part of Internet of Things (IoT) applications to gather the sensors data from the application field. Many energy efficient routing protocols have been proposed for improving the WSN life. For improving the network lifetime through routing, energy heterogeneity scenarios have been exploited and addition/placement of few energy harvesting nodes in WSN is utilized, where the energy harvesting nodes decreases the energy burden on the battery powered nodes in the WSN. This paper considers a routing scenario for two level energy heterogeneous WSN and assesses the reliable network lifetime(stability period and 10% dead nodes scenario) under different energy harvesting node placement scenarios. A comparative study of lifetime behavior is presented for variation in battery capacities of the energy rich nodes and the energy harvesting nodes. The results provide an insight for optimizing nodes' battery capacities for achieving improved reliable lifetime with minimum battery units in the system.