Interconnected Wireless Sensors with Energy Harvesting

This paper studies interconnected wireless sensors with the paradigm of Energy Packet Networks (EPN) which were previously introduced. In the EPN model, both data transmissions and the flow of energy are discretized, so that an energy packet (EP) is the minimum amount of energy (say in microjules) that is needed to process and transmit a data packet (DP) or to process a job. Previous work has modeled such systems to determine the relation between energy flow and DP transmission, or to study the balance between energy and the processing of jobs in Cloud Servers. The lack of energy, in addition to processing times, is the main source of latency in networks of sensor nodes. Thus this paper models this phenomenon, and shows that under some reasonable conditions, assuming feedforward flow of data packets and local consumption and leakage of energy, such networks have product form solutions.