Harvested Energy Scavenging and Transfer capabilities in Opportunistic Ring Routing

Energy conservation has always been a prominent design goal for hierarchical routing protocols supporting sink mobility. Advertising the current position of mobile sink introduces control packet overhead which ultimately results in an increase in energy consumption and shorter network lifetime. Energy harvesting through ambient sources have enabled the utilization of rechargeable devices for Wireless Sensor Networks to perpetually remain operational. The modifications in the hierarchical structure of wireless sensor networks along with energy scavenging approaches could possibly minimize the control packet overhead and also provide a significant improvement in energy conservation. In this paper, we propose a novel Harvested Energy Scavenging and Transfer capabilities in Opportunistic Ring Routing protocol which uses a distinguishing approach of hybrid (ring + cluster) topology in which the network architecture is initially supported by the formation of a virtual ring structure and then a two-tier routing topology is used in the virtual ring as an overlay by grouping nodes into clusters. The rate of energy gain from solar harvesting and radio frequency transfer is the criterion for selecting cluster heads. The role of cluster heads is exploited to advertise the mobile sink current position as well as forward the aggregated data towards mobile sink using energy transfer based opportunistic routing. The simulation results reveal that our scheme considerably outperforms the existing benchmarks in terms of control packet overhead, energy conservation, network lifetime, packet delivery ratio and average end-end delay.