Energy-efficient routing protocol for energy harvesting wireless sensor network

Generally, the energy of the wireless sensor network (WSN) is powered by limited and portable batteries. Since there is a great challenge along with the increasing demands in sensor networks for multimedia applications, using renewable energy in WSNs becomes essential. In this paper, the nodes in WSN generate renewable energy used for routing and sensing by solar panel and the energy-efficient routing protocol for energy harvesting WSN is designed and implemented. In selecting routes, the transmission quality, energy consumption and energy wasting are taken into account and the effect of bit error rate (BER) is considered. The transmission quality is affected by BER as a Bernoulli process. Dynamic programming is utilized to find the shortest path after which the network is divided into different layers to evaluate the energy efficiency. In simulation experiment, the protocol is compared with two existing protocol: Minimum-hop routing protocol and Dynamic power-conscious routing scheme. The experimental result shows that the proposed routing protocol outperforms the other two protocols in terms of transmission quality, energy consumption and energy wasting.