Energy-Neutral Communication Protocol for Living-Tree Bioenergy-Powered Wireless Sensor Network

The purpose of this paper is to represent a living-tree biological energy powered wireless sensor system and introduce a novel energy aware MAC protocol based on remaining energy level, energy harvesting status, and application requirements. Conventional wireless sensor network (WSN) cannot have an infinite lifetime without battery recharge or replacement. Energy harvesting (EH), from environmental energy sources, is a promising technology to provide sustainable powering for WSN. In this paper, a sensor network system has been developed which uses living-tree bioenergy as harvesting resource and super capacitor as energy storage. Moreover, by analyzing the power recharging, task arrangement, and energy consumption rate, a novel duty cycle-based energy-neutral MAC protocol is proposed. It dynamically optimizes each wireless sensor node’s duty cycle to create a balanced, efficient, and continuous network. The scheme is implemented in a plant surface-mounted bioenergy power wireless sensor node system called PBN, which aims to monitoring the plant’s growth parameters. The results show that the proposed MAC protocol can provide sustainable and reliable data transmission under ultralow and dynamic power inputs; it also significantly improves the latency and packet loss probability compared with other MAC protocols for EH-WSN.