Energy-balanced cooperative transmission based on relay selection and power control in energy harvesting wireless sensor network

Energy harvesting can be leveraged by Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to address its energy-scarcity problem, giving rise to Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Network (EHWSN). Residual energy balancing of sensors is the key issue to avoid sensors’ failure and promise the network function of EHWSN. In this paper, by exploiting the sensors around the source and sink as relays, we propose a distributed relay selection and power control scheme to balance sensors’ residual energy in EHWSN. To achieve the optimal power control of each relay, we formulate a maximization of minimum value problem which can be efficiently solved by utilizing its linear structure. The optimal relay is selected in a distributed manner by setting the highest priority to the relay which can maximize the minimum residual energy of sensors. Through extensive performance evaluations, we verify that DEBS can be applied to effectively balance the residual energy of sensors. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.