Towards Energy Neutrality in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks: A Case for Distributed Compressive Sensing?

TL;DR

This paper explores how distributed compressive sensing can enable energy-neutral operation in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks by leveraging energy and sensing diversity to optimize energy use and data collection.

Contribution

It introduces the use of distributed compressive sensing in EH WSNs to enhance network lifetime and data rates, highlighting mechanisms for energy and sensing diversity.

Findings

Distributed compressive sensing improves data gathering efficiency.

Energy diversity allows for variable energy harvesting across nodes.

Simulation results demonstrate potential for energy-neutral WSNs.

Abstract

This paper advocates the use of the emerging distributed compressive sensing (DCS) paradigm in order to deploy energy harvesting (EH) wireless sensor networks (WSN) with practical network lifetime and data gathering rates that are substantially higher than the state-of-the-art. In particular, we argue that there are two fundamental mechanisms in an EH WSN: i) the energy diversity associated with the EH process that entails that the harvested energy can vary from sensor node to sensor node, and ii) the sensing diversity associated with the DCS process that entails that the energy consumption can also vary across the sensor nodes without compromising data recovery. We also argue that such mechanisms offer the means to match closely the energy demand to the energy supply in order to unlock the possibility for energy-neutral WSNs that leverage EH capability. A number of analytic and simulation results are presented in order to illustrate the potential of the approach.