Multi-commodity online maximum lifetime utility routing for energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks

The energy limitation of wireless sensor networks can be solved by harvesting energy from environmental sources such as solar and wind to power the sensor nodes. We propose an energy-harvest-aware routing scheme that incorporates harvest availability properties and energy storage capacity limits into the routing decisions. In contrast to most existing energy-harvesting routing algorithms that route each traffic flow independently from each other, we consider multiple traffic flows, or commodities, and formulate the multi-commodity routing problem as linear optimization problem. The proposed scheme balances two routing objectives of maximum total and maximum minimum residual energy to prolong the network lifetime. The simulation results show that both higher total and higher minimum residual energies are achieved.