ReNEW: A Practical Module for Reliable Routing in Networks of Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensors

Many Internet of Things smart-* applications are being powered solely through ambient energy-harvested energy. These applications require periodic data collection with low latency and high reliability. Since the energy is harvested in small amounts from ambient sources and is stochastic in nature, it is extremely challenging to achieve low latency and high reliability for such applications. To this end, we propose a distributed, energy-management module called ReNEW, for Constructive Interference (CI) based protocols that utilizes the available energy effectively in order to achieve our target of increased reliability in EH-WSN, especially in the low harvesting regimes. We choose CI-based protocols to leverage the low latency guarantees. Specifically, we propose a Markov decision model to maximize the energy utility in the infinite horizon by allocating energy optimally. To this end, we also propose a threshold optimal policy. As we find that just a energy scheduler cannot achieve the goal, we also propose distributed techniques to conserve energy on the redundant nodes in the network, and dynamically activate them based on feedback. We also improve the performance of CI by adapting the transmit powers on nodes. We implement and evaluate ReNEW on Indriya testbed for real-world scenarios. We show that in a network of 20 source nodes out of the 30 nodes in the network can perform periodic data collection with an improvement of 2.5 times higher packet reception ratio as compared to LWB. This is one of the worst case scenarios as the harvested energy is as low as 50uJ/s and packets of size 100 B is sent every 30 s. Furthermore, in this scenario, ReNEW saves around 25% higher residual energy on the average as compared to the standard LWB. In a nutshell, by integrating ReNEW with CI based protocols, we enable guaranteed latency and increased reliability for the batteryless EH-WSNs.