A Fair Polling Scheme for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy harvesting wireless sensor network (EHWSNs) are being actively studied in order to solve the problems faced by battery-operated WSNs, namely the cost for battery replacement and impacts on the environment. In EH-WSNs, each node harvests ambient energy, such as light, heat, vibration, and uses it for sensing, computations, and wireless communications, where the amount of harvested energy of each node varies depending on their surrounding environments. MAC protocols for EH-WSNs need to be designed to achieve high throughput and fairness, however, the conventional MAC protocols proposed for EH-WSNs do not adapt to the harvesting rate of each node, resulting in poor fairness. In this paper, we propose a fair MAC protocol based on polling scheme for EH-WSNs. The proposed scheme adjusts contention probability of each node according to the individual harvesting rate, thereby increasing throughput achieved by nodes with low harvesting rate. We evaluate throughput and fairness of the proposed fair polling scheme by computer simulations, and show that the proposed scheme can improve fairness with little degradation of the overall network throughput.