Energy harvesting aware topology control with power adaptation in wireless sensor networks

In the recent years, energy harvesting technology has been integrated into wireless sensor networks for resolving the energy “bottleneck” problems caused by the limited-capacity batteries equipped in traditional sensor nodes. However, due to the limited capacity of energy buffers equipped for storing the harvested energy, excessive harvested energy is indiscreetly discarded while sensor nodes are staying at the status of energy saturation. To address this issue, we present a topology control approach, for the energy harvesting wireless sensor network, that allows each node to adaptively adjust its transmission power for utilizing the harvested energy effectively. Specifically, we first model the behaviors of sensor nodes as an ordinal potential game where the high harvesting power nodes cooperate with the low harvesting power nodes to maintain the connectivity of the whole network. And we theoretically prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium for the game. Then, a polynomial-time algorithm is proposed to achieve the Nash equilibrium. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme improves the energy availability and outperforms existing energy-aware schemes in terms of energy conservation and balanced distribution.