An empirical study of harvesting-aware duty cycling in environmentally-powered wireless sensor networks

In an environmentally-powered wireless sensor network, where nodes are powered solely by harvesting energy from ambient sources, node operation highly depends on the energy availability and harvesting rate. For duty-cycling schemes to support existing wireless sensor network applications, they need to adapt the nodes´ sleep-wake schedules according to energy harvesting and consumption rates. In this paper, we propose a harvesting-aware duty-cycling scheme, perform an empirical study of this scheme over a solar harvesting powered wireless sensor network in a source-relay-sink configuration, and provide some experimental results to illustrate its throughput performance under various light conditions.