Structure-Free General Data Aggregation Scheduling for Multihop Battery-Free Wireless Networks

With advances in wireless power transfer techniques, battery-free wireless sensor networks (BF-WSNs) which can support long-term applications, has been attracting increasing interests in recent years. Unfortunately, the problem of minimum latency aggregation scheduling (MLAS) is not well studied in BF-WSNs. Existing works always have a rigid assumption that there is only one single query which is targeted at the whole network. Aiming at making the work more practical and general, we investigate the general MLAS problem in BF-WSNs, which is targeted at any subset of nodes in the network and aimed for an arbitrary number of aggregation queries. First, the general MLAS problem when there is one single query is studied. To control the number of nodes participating in the aggregation process, a node selection algorithm is proposed to cover and connect the whole target nodes. Then, a latency and energy aware scheduling algorithm is proposed to integrate the construction of aggregation tree with the chosen nodes, and the computation of a conflict-free schedule simultaneously, relying on non-predetermined structures. Second, the general MLAS problem when there is a group of aggregation queries is studied. Through designing some special structures to avoid collisions between both current and existing aggregation schedules, an algorithm without any waiting time is proposed. Additionally, the algorithm under physical interference model and dynamic energy arrival model are also presented. The theoretical analysis and simulation results verify that the proposed algorithms have high performance in terms of latency and energy efficiency.

Automated summary

With advancements in wireless power transfer techniques, battery-free wireless sensor networks (BF-WSNs) have gained increasing attention for supporting long-term applications. However, the minimum latency aggregation scheduling (MLAS) problem in BF-WSNs has not been well studied. This paper investigates the general MLAS problem in BF-WSNs, targeting any subset of nodes and arbitrary number of aggregation queries. The proposed algorithms demonstrate high performance in terms of latency and energy efficiency.