EH-GPSR: An Energy Harvesting Protocol for IoT-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Energy harvesting is a promising paradigm in the Internet of things based on wireless sensor networks (IoT-based WSNs) for emerging applications such as smart cities, healthcare, and farming. Although the amalgamation of energy harvesting in WSNs (EH-WSNs) fostered many new opportunities, they still face challenging requirements to achieve high sustainability. Nowadays, most research efforts are focused on curtailing the limitation of the energy supply of IoT sensors, which strongly impacts their design. Therefore, new efficient energy harvesting routing protocols need to be developed, while ensuring network reliability and continuity. In this paper, we proposed a new energy harvesting greedy perimeter stateless routing protocol (EH-GPSR) to address the issue of limited sensor energy. EH-GPSR employs an EH rate in a cost function, derived from the randomized minimum path recovery time (R-MPRT) algorithm, to measure the harvested energy. Farther, it improves the greedy routing mechanism. Specifically, it uses a weighted function that combines the destination distance information with the EH rate-based cost to adaptively select the next hop. The simulation results showed that our protocol EH-GPSR extends the network lifetime and allows a better packet delivery rate by more than 20% compared to the GPSR protocol.