Network Energy Driven Wireless Sensor Networks

Scarcity of energy in tiny battery-powered wireless sensor nodes have led to a tremendous amount of research thrust at all protocol levels in wireless networks. Despite efficient design of the underlying communication protocols, limited battery energy primarily restricts the usage of nodes and hence the lifetime of the network. As a result, although there has been a lot of promise of pervasive networking via sensors, limited energy of the nodes has been a major bottleneck to deployment feasibility and cost of such a network. With this view, alongside many innovative network communication protocol research to increase nodal as well as network lifetime, there have been significant ongoing efforts on how to impart energy to the depleted batteries on-line. In this chapter, we propose to apply the lessons learnt from our surrounding nature and practices of the living world to realize network energy operated field sensors. We show that, although the regular communicating nodes may not benefit from network energy harvesting, by modifying the carrier sensing principle in a hierarchical network setting, the low power consuming field nodes can extend their lifetimes, or even the scavenged RF energy can be sufficient for the uninterrupted processing and transmission activities of the field nodes.