A Review on Transmission Control Strategies in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have to sacrifice part of their performance to save energy in order to prolong the network life with limited capacity of common batteries. In order to break through the limitation of limited energy on the performance of WSNs, Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs) get more attention. Theoretically, unlimited energy provides the basis for the continuous operation of sensor nodes, which makes the design of EH-WSNs more focused on meeting the requirements of data transmission quality and efficiency. Accordingly, the energy harvesting characteristics present more challenges to the design and optimization of Transmission Control Strategies (TCS) for EH-WSNs. We present and introduce the concept of TCS, which includes energy management strategy, routing protocol optimization, Media Access Control (MAC) protocol optimization and cross-layer optimization. Then, we review and evaluate the TCS related research progress of EH-WSNs, and puts forward the future challenges and prospects of related research.