Near Optimal Power and Rate Control of Multi-Hop Sensor Networks With Energy Replenishment: Basic Limitations With Finite Energy and Data Storage

Renewable energy sources can be attached to sensor nodes to provide energy replenishment for extending the battery life and prolonging the overall lifetime of sensor networks. For networks with replenishment, conservative energy expenditure may lead to missed recharging opportunities due to battery capacity limitations, while aggressive usage of energy may result in reduced coverage or connectivity for certain time periods. Thus, new power allocation schemes need to be designed to balance these seemingly contradictory goals, in order to maximize sensor network performance. In this paper, we study the problem of how to jointly control the data queue and battery buffer to maximize the long-term average sensing rate of a wireless sensor network with replenishment under certain QoS constraints for the data and battery queues. We propose a unified algorithm structure and analyze the performance of the algorithm for all combinations of finite and infinite data and battery buffer sizes. We also provide a distributed version of the algorithm with provably efficient performance.