Joint Power Control, Scheduling and Routing for Multicast in Multihop Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks

The authors consider the problem of joint power control, scheduling and routing in energy harvesting sensor networks allowing for multicast of data generated at the sensor nodes to a set of sink nodes. In this setup they exploit broadcast nature of the channels and network coding to show performance improvement. They also develop computationally efficient suboptimal algorithms and study their performance. They study wireless multi-hop energy harvesting sensor networks employed for random field estimation. The sensors sense a random field and generate data that is to be sent to sink node for estimation. Each sensor has an energy harvesting source and can operate in two modes: Wake and Sleep. The sleep mode is a power saving mode in which the sensor only harvests energy and performs no other functions so that the energy consumption is negligible.