Integrated distributed energy awareness for wireless sensor networks
Geoffrey Werner Challen, Jason Waterman, Matt Welsh · 2009
Energy in sensor networks is distributed and non-transferable. Over time, differences in energy availability across the network are likely to arise. Protocols such as routing engines can concentrate energy load at certain nodes. Variations in incident sunlight can produce different solar charging rates at different nodes. Because many sensor network applications require nodes collaborate --- to ensure complete sensor coverage or route data to the network's edge --- a small set of nodes threatened by low energy availability can have a disproportionate impact on the entire network. For example, the loss of a single sink node may render the application unable to communicate with all the other nodes.