A Practical Flow Control Scheme Considering Optimal Energy Allocation in Solar-Powered WSNs

Using solar power in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires a different approach to energy consumption from networks with battery-based nodes. Since solar energy can be harvested periodically, our aim is to use this harvested energy efficiently for specific network-wide performance goals, not just to minimize the energy consumption to sustain the network lifetime. Therefore, we propose a flow control algorithm to maximize the amount of data collected by the network while cooperating with our energy allocation scheme in order to efficiently use the available solar energy which varies from time to time. Our algorithm runs on each node in a distributed manner using only information about its neighbors. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on a real solar-powered WSN.