Poster Abstract: Selective Flooding-Based Communication for Energy Harvesting Networks

Abstract

With the Internet of Things (IoT) large amounts of data can be gathered at the edge, centrally collected and subsequently utilized for various application domains. Efficient and reliable synchronous communication protocols are essential for automated data gathering, yet they typically require a stable energy supply. Energy harvesting enables long-term deployments, but it imposes widely varying energy budgets on each node in the network. To remain efficient, synchronous protocols need to consider this energy variability. We propose a selective flooding protocol that employs low-energy communication rounds for all nodes and additional high-energy rounds only for nodes with high input power thus increasing their throughput. Low-energy rounds gather data with high reliability and maintain global network synchronization, while high-energy rounds use increased transmit power to overcome potentially-broken links that depend on low-power nodes. We evaluate our proposed method on the FlockLab testbed and build a small network composed of standalone energy harvesting nodes. The average power consumption of almost 84 mu W and 177 mu W for low- and high-power nodes, respectively, are fully sustainable by indoor photovoltaic harvesting.