Flow Sharing Reliability in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensing Networks

This paper introduces a new resource sharing problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that employ energy harvesting for prolonged network uptime. The problem is on managing a given infrastructure of EH-WSNs by supporting concurrent applications. Each application is characterized by a set of traffic generating nodes, a sink node, and a minimum required traffic rate that should be periodically delivered to its sink node. The overall EH-WSN is modelled by a probabilistic graph where energy fluctuation over time in each node is described by a probability distribution and handled by adjusting the flow relaying capacity of a node. Performance of the obtained network management scheme is assessed by a reliability metric on the formulated probabilistic graph. We call the formulated problem the flow sharing reliability (FS-REL) problem in EH-WSNs. We present a heuristic algorithm to cope with the problem using ideas from minimum cost multi-commodity flows in networks and approximation of flow reliability using a factoring algorithm. We also present numerical results that give more insights into the problem and the proposed solution.