Resource Allocation in Sensor Networks with Renewable Energy

Renewable energy sources can be attached to sensor nodes to provide energy replenishment for prolonging the lifetime of sensor networks. However, 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 single communication link in rechargeable sensor networks. The coupling between the battery and data buffers does not lend itself amenable to traditional resource optimization techniques. Thus, we develop a new power and rate allocation scheme that explicitly takes this coupling into account. The new scheme is a simple myopic scheme whose performance is shown to be arbitrarily close to optimal analytically and via simulations.