Information dissemination with epidemic routing in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

The effectiveness of epidemic routing for information dissemination in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks is examined in this work. Here, information is to be disseminated from a few nodes to a considerable fraction of all other nodes in the network. The use of epidemic routing is motivated by the fact that, when sensors are supported solely by harvested energy, the sensors´ availability and the network topology may change dynamically due to the uncertainty of the energy arrival at the sensors. With epidemic routing, a node will receive and forward a packet to all other nodes in its neighborhood whenever it is able to do so. Each node will keep the packet only for a certain time duration depending on its recovery rate. By utilizing only energy harvested from the environment, the transmission radius of each sensor (and, thus, the network connectivity) is affected by its local energy arrival and the time in between transmissions. The less frequently it transmits, the further the distance it is able to reach. Two cases are examined in this work: 1) the case with identical transmission radius and 2) the case with identical inter-transmission time. The first case occurs when sensors transmit with fixed power and the second case occurs when the sensors operate under a fixed sleep-wake cycle or TDMA scheduling. The transmission radius and intertransmission time required to guarantee that a considerable fraction of nodes receive the information is derived for a given sensor density and recovery rate. Computer simulations are provided to validate our theoretical claims.