An Energy-Efficient TDMA Algorithm for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, it has been shown that energy harvesting can be utilized to enhance the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks. However, energy harvesting is a stochastic process, which in turn imposes an energy availability constraint on the system’s design, necessitating the demand for communication and networking protocols and algorithms that can handle this constraint. In this paper, we propose a time division multiple access (TDMA) system and algorithm for a single-hop energy harvesting wireless sensor network. Unlike the existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm synchronizes nodes not only based on the synchronization packets from the central node but also based on a data packet from another node. In addition, the proposed algorithm synchronizes nodes only when all of them are out-of-energy or when a transmission overlap occurs. We implemented the proposed algorithm on an Arduino-based network. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the average energy consumption and the average delay while handling clock drift between nodes. Compared to the most recent algorithm, the proposed algorithm reduces the average energy consumption by approximately 7 times and decreases the average delay by approximately 12 times.