Design of MAC Protocol for Wireless Energy Harvesting Sensor Network

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate MAC protocols in wireless energy harvesting sensor network and propose an improvement method in terms of channel reliability. The energy harvesting are technologies that gather energy from various sources such as radio waves, light energy, and vibration energy. The proposed protocol is a kind of energy harvesting technology which uses radio frequency (RF) waves among these sources. This protocol can be used to charge a battery of sensor nodes in wireless energy harvesting sensor network. The wireless energy harvesting sensor network, unlike the traditional wireless sensor network, it requires new functions to transmit and receive energy as well as data between nodes. It means that a new communication protocol is needed because it is difficult to support the functions using existing communication protocols. In this paper, we introduce MAC protocol called RF-MAC which is suitable for wireless energy harvesting sensor network and propose the enhanced protocol. We introduce a new node called energy and data transmitter (EDT) that can transmit energy and data on a same signal using simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technology. If multiple EDTs transmit energy and data to a sensor node simultaneously, it has similar effect with multi-input single output (MISO) technology. Thus, the channel reliability can be increased by the proposed protocol in poor channel condition. We compare the proposed protocol with RF-MAC in terms of the channel reliability and observe 50% maximum packet reception rate improvement than RF-MAC.