Performance of Wireless Nano-Sensor Networks with Energy Harvesting

With recent advances in energy harvesting technology, practical wireless nano-sensor networks (WNSNs) are coming within reach. An important aspect of these WNSNs is that the charge time is significantly longer than each sensor mote can reliably transmit its data-leading to sparse transmission requests in the time-domain. In this paper, we propose a compressed sensing-based approach for efficient request handling. We show that our scheme can achieve near contention free transmission while ensuring that each sensor mote´s queue is stable. This sharply contrasts with the unstable sensor mote queues obtained using the standard round- robin approach. To guide design, we also derive closed-form expressions for the average energy consumption, which show that the average energy state of the battery increases exponentially with the transmit power.