Analysis, Comparison, and Optimization of Routing Protocols for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy harvesting has been steadily gaining interest in the wireless sensor network community. Instead of minimizing the energy consumption and maximizing a network's operational time, the main challenge in energy harvesting sensor networks is to maximize the utility of the application subject to the harvested energy. One major challenge is to maximize the data delivery rates by exploiting the spatial variations of environmental energy. While there exists a multiplicity of energy-aware routing protocols for sensor networks without energy harvesting capabilities, only a small number of routing protocols have been published which explicitly account for energy harvesting.