Asynchronous data-forwarding strategy to reduce forwarding delay in energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks

The existing data-forwarding strategies in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) may not be feasible for some applications where synchronisation and physical location information are not available. A novel asynchronous data-forwarding strategy for energy-harvesting WSNs is proposed, where the sleep duration, wake-up moment and the transmission coverage of a sensor node are determined independently on a per-node basis. This strategy obviates the need for synchronisation control and the precise location information of the sensor node. The numerical results show that the data-forwarding delay can be significantly reduced by the proposed strategy. The reduction in the delay is more notable for WSNs with more sensor nodes.