An Energy Harvesting Aware Routing Algorithm for Hierarchical Clustering Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, energy harvesting technology has been integrated into wireless sensor networks to ameliorate the nodes' energy limitation problem. In theory, the wireless sensor node equipped with an energy harvesting module can work permanently until hardware failures happen. However, due to the change of power supply, the traditional hierarchical network routing protocol can not be effectively adopted in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we improve the Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol to make it suitable for the energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. Specifically, the cluster heads are selected according to the estimation of nodes' harvested energy and consumed energy. Preference is given to the nodes with high harvested energy while taking the energy consumption rate into account. The utilization of harvested energy is mathematically formulated as a max-min optimization problem which maximizes the minimum energy conservation of each node. We have proved that maximizing the minimum energy conservation is an NP-hard problem theoretically. Thus, a polynomial time algorithm has been proposed to derive the near-optimal performance. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed routing scheme outperforms previous works in terms of energy conservation and balanced distribution.