An effective routing protocol for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

In traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the power supply is a limiting factor on the lifetime of sensor nodes. Recently, energy harvesting technology has made it possible to develop autonomous WSNs with theoretical unlimited lifetimes. However, the change of power supply calls for a different version of network protocol. In this paper, we introduce Energy Potential Function which is utilized to measure the node´s capability of energy harvesting and extend the traditional protocol LEACH to Energy Potential LEACH which is suitable for energy harvesting WSNs. Energy Potential LEACH can not only extend network lifetimes, but also improve the network throughput in energy harvesting WSNs. We evaluate the proposed protocol analytically and numerically, and find that it exhibits a better performance than previous work in terms of lifetimes and throughput.