SmartMote: Energy and VoI aware solar-powered sensor network design for environment monitoring

Due to advances in low power micro-sensor technology, energy harvesting techniques, we can now build large scale solar-powered sensor networks to support long-running operations. Solar powered sensors often harvest variable amounts of energy in different weather conditions. Then a primary requirement for an efficient and a long-running solar-powered sensor system is to adapt to changing environment conditions and resources, and to gather as much valuable data as possible. Sensing and collecting data at a constant rate, without taking into account energy availability or data deliverability, will either drain the battery or waste resources. In this work, we design and test a highly efficient and robust solar-powered system SmartMote; and we further present an energy and value of information (VoI) aware routing strategy, that balances the rates of sensing with packet delivery for SmartMote. SmartMote achieves fairness and near maximum utility across the network. We deploy SmartMote in a forest with 100 sensors in order to monitor the humidity, temperature and luminance intensity. Our experimental results corroborate our design.