Balancing harvesting energy consumption with potential field in wireless sensor networks

In energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes equipped with a harvesting device scavenge the valuable energy from ambient environments. In this paper, we consider the routing problem of jointly considering the distance, the remaining energy and energy-harvesting capability of sensor nodes with the objective to route the collected data toward the sink node by going through the high-density harvesting energy areas in which sensor nodes are distributed with high density and with strong energy-harvesting capability. To address this, we first establish a “Hybrid Virtual Potential Field” and thereby design an efficient algorithm for deriving the harvesting energy balanced path for routing the network data along the high-density harvesting energy area. The simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm on balancing the harvesting energy consumption by comparing with existing algorithms and by under different weather conditions.