Latency Efficient Data Collection Scheduling in Battery-Free Wireless Sensor Networks

The lifetime of battery-powered Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are limited by the batteries equipped in sensors. The appearance of Battery-Free Wireless Sensor Networks (BF-WSNs) breaks through this limitation, in which battery-free sensors harvest energy from sustainable but uncontrollable energy sources in ambient environment, such as solar power, wind power and radio frequency signal power\emph{etc}. The energy characteristics of BF-WSNs make it more challenging for data collection scheduling in BF-WSNs. Latency of data collection is a crucial measurement to evaluate the performance of data collection schedules. In this paper, we study the problem of minimum latency data collection scheduling in BF-WSNs and propose latency efficient data collection scheduling algorithm for line BF-WSNs and general BF-WSNs, respectively. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations are conducted to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.