Adapting Probabilistic Flooding in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Technological advantages in energy harvesting have been successfully applied in wireless sensor network environments, prolonging network’s lifetime, and, therefore, classical networking approaches like information dissemination need to be readdressed. More specifically, Probabilistic Flooding information dissemination is revisited in this work and it is observed that certain limitations arise due to the idiosyncrasies of nodes’ operation in energy harvesting network environments, resulting in reduced network coverage. In order to address this challenge, a modified version of Probabilistic Flooding is proposed, called Robust Probabilistic Flooding, which is capable of dealing with nodes of about to be exhausted batteries that resume their operation after ambient energy collection. In order to capture the behavior of the nodes’ operational states, a Markov chain model is also introduced and—based on certain observations and assumptions presented here—is subsequently simplified. Simulation results based on the proposed Markov chain model and a solar radiation dataset demonstrate the inefficiencies of Probabilistic Flooding and show that its enhanced version (i.e., Robust Probabilistic Flooding) is capable of fully covering the network on the expense of increased termination time in energy harvesting environments. Another advantage is that no extra overhead is introduced regarding the number of disseminated messages, thus not introducing any extra transmissions and therefore the consumed energy does not increase.