Using a mobile vehicle for road condition surveillance by energy harvesting sensor nodes

In this paper, we introduce the problem of road condition surveillance using a mobile vehicle as a concrete practical application of data collection paradigm on a direct path in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs). The application components together with its associated challenges are discussed throughout the paper. An optimization model is introduced for the network throughput maximization problem. In contrast to the previous models, the proposed optimization model considers the effective and heterogeneous duration of sensor´s transmission together with the dynamic aspect of energy harvesting over different time intervals. Towards the improvement of the network throughput under a proposed condition, an online centralized algorithm with less complexity is designed. Finally, simulations on both Random and Equal-Distance deployment of sensor nodes are conducted to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with the previous approaches and to observe the effect of different energy harvesting distributions on the throughput achieved by the algorithm.