Energy Provisioning in Green Mesh Networks Using Positional Awareness

Untethered vehicular roadside infrastructure will eventually be deployed using various energy sustainable designs. In the solar-powered case, cost-effective nodes must be provisioned with a combination of a solar panel and a battery, which is sufficient to prevent future node outage. During the network design phase, a bandwidth usage profile (BUP) is assumed, and historical solar insolation traces are used to determine the minimum-cost provisioning that is required for each network node. In practical systems, however, there are usually restrictions in the way that the nodes can be positioned, and this results in a time-varying and node-dependent attenuation of the available solar energy. Unfortunately, conventional resource provisioning methods cannot take this into account; therefore, the deployed system may be unnecessarily expensive. In this paper, the resource provisioning problem is considered from this point of view. We first review conventional resource provisioning mechanisms and give an example that shows the value of introducing positional solar insolation awareness. A provisioning algorithm is then introduced that takes known positional variations into consideration when performing the energy provisioning. A variety of results are then presented, which show that reductions in total network provisioning cost can be obtained using the proposed methodology, compared with conventional algorithms. The proposed algorithm also performs very well compared with a linear programming formulation, which gives lower bounds on the node resource provisioning cost assignments.