Title: Practical scheduling for stochastic event capture in energy harvesting sensor networks

Authors: Haipeng Dai; Xiaobing Wu; Lijie Xu; Fan Wu; Shibo He; Guihai Chen

Addresses: State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China ' State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China ' State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China ' State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310027, China ' State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China; Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

Abstract: Existing scheduling schemes for stochastic event capture with rechargeable sensors either adopt simplified assumptions on event's properties or provide no performance guarantee. Considering the stochasticity of event staying time and event capture utility, we investigate the sensor scheduling problem aiming to maximise the overall quality of monitoring (QoM) in event capture application of energy harvesting sensor networks. We first provide a paradigm to calculate the QoM of a point of interests (PoI) and formulate the scheduling problem as an optimisation problem. Although we find that this problem is NP-complete, we prove that the problem can be cast as maximisation of a submodular function subject to matroid constraints. Accordingly, we can design centralised and distributed algorithms, each of which achieves a factor of 1=2 of the optimum. We evaluate the performance of our solution through simulations, and simulation results show that our scheme outperforms former works.

Keywords: energy harvesting; sensor networks; event capture; sensor scheduling; submodularity; stochastic events; quality of monitoring; QoM; optimisation; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2015.069862

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2015 Vol.18 No.1/2, pp.85 - 100

Received: 14 Jun 2013
Accepted: 26 Dec 2013
Published online: 15 Jun 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article