Delay Bounded Maintenance Scheme in Rechargeable Wireless Sensor Networks

In rechargeable wireless sensor networks, owing to the current energy conversion technology limitations, the energy harvested from surrounding environment usually is not enough to continually power sensor nodes. Therefore, the nodes have to operate in a very low duty cycle, which means nodes have to activate shortly and stay in the sleep state most of the time in order to recharge the energy. On the other hand, due to sporadic availability of energy, nodes must adjust their duty cycles continuously. Hence, packet delivery latency is critical in rechargeable WSNs. In this work, we introduce an active instance augmented scheme and provide an algorithm for finding the minimal sleep latency from a node to the sink by augmenting minimal h active instances. For bounding E2E delay from source node to the sink in the network, we propose an E2E delay maintenance solution. Through extensive simulation and experiments, we demonstrate our delay bound maintenance scheme is efficient to provide E2E delay guarantees in rechargeable wireless sensor networks.