Minimizing Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks using Solar Powered sensors

In the last years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained increasing attention from both research community and actual users. Since sensor nodes are battery-powered devices, the main issue to resolve is to minimize the energy consumption of nodes so that the network lifetime can be extended to reasonable periods of time. Several algorithms were proposed to meet strict energy saving requirements which may be divided into: Location; Data-centric; Mobility; Multipath; Heterogeneity; Qos and other specific criterions. However, those protocols based on the client-server concept don’t actually consider the fact that a sensor node has to afford various capabilities for multiple applications. That’s why researches introduced the Mobile Agent (MA) approach which is a special kind of software that migrates among network nodes to carry out tasks autonomously and intelligently. The Mobile Agent saves a great amount of energy but still presents much more latency compared with the client–server approach. Looking for alternative energy source seems efficient for prolonging the network lifetime moreover, solar energy has become more attractive recently because of its environmental benefits and because the efficiency of photovoltaic cells has increased significantly in the past few years. That’s why, in this work, we tried to find a trade-off balance between the energy consumption and task latency using both solar powered nodes and Mobile Agents and we presented afterwards an improved version of the Balanced Itinerary Planning for Multiple Mobile Agents (BST-MIP) algorithm based on solar powered sensors as alternative energy source in order to highlight the pros of our new approach.