DEARER: A Distance-and-Energy-Aware Routing With Energy Reservation for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider cluster-based routing protocols for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. Since the energy harvesting process does not match the real energy demand, sensor nodes suffer from occasional energy shortages, especially when they serve as cluster head (CH) nodes. To address this problem, we propose a cluster-based routing protocol referred to as distance-and-energy-aware routing with energy reservation (DEARER). The DEARER protocol encourages nodes with high energy-arrival rate or being close to the sink to serve as CH nodes. Also, DEARER allows non-CH nodes to reserve a portion of the harvested energy for future use. In doing so, the DEARER selects “enabler” nodes as CH nodes and provides them with more energy, thereby mitigating the energy shortage events at CH nodes. By theoretical analysis and numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the DEARER protocol outperforms direct transmission and also approaches the genie-aided routing, where CH nodes are selected based on the real-time energy information of each node.