Reliable Multicast and Broadcast Mechanisms for Energy-Harvesting Devices

The technologies of energy harvesting enable wireless sensors to provide a slow but steady transmission rate with very low deployment cost. To efficiently (re)configure settings, transmit data, or update system information to a group of energy-harvesting devices, broadcast/multicast schemes should be carefully designed. Currently, two main challenges to reliable broadcast transmission are known as transmission error and energy deficiency. The former comes from nonperfect channel conditions, and the latter is a result of power shortage, causing devices to work abnormally due to energy exhaustion. Considering the two challenges, we propose an erasure-based broadcast scheme for an energy-harvesting network to guarantee reliable broadcast transmission. We address the tradeoff between reliability and throughput, and based on this, we propose three policies to determine the broadcast period for different performance requirements. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes and policies can significantly improve the performance of broadcast transmission based on energy harvesting characteristics.