Relay Usage Scheduling in Sensor Networks with Energy Harvesting

Sensors equipped with energy harvesting capabilities are a viable solution to the limitations of current battery technology associated with wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper addresses the problem of developing energy efficient transmission strategies for WSNs with energy harvesting capabilities and cooperative transmission options. Taking into account the energy harvesting capabilities of the sensors, decision policies are developed to determine the transmission mode to use at a given instant of time in order to maximize the quality of coverage. The problem is formulated in a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework and an upper bound on the performance of arbitrary policies is determined.