Data aggregation for machine-to-machine communication with energy harvesting

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications have emerged as a new concept for the next generation of sensing and actuating systems. With the recent emergence of energy harvesting technologies, the current communication solutions have addressed the problem of controlling the data communication to regulate efficiently the energy consumption, aiming to avoid under and overuse of energy. However, these solutions do not consider data aggregation as means of controlling the network traffic. To fill this gap, this paper proposes the Data Aggregation for energy harVesting NETworks (DAV-NET), which regulates the energy consumption in accordance with the residual energy stored in the batteries, exploiting the data aggregation capabilities to control the network traffic. The performed simulations show that the proposed solution is able to regulate the energy consumption in case of abundant or scarce energy, controlling the aggregation level in a distributed fashion.