Position Aware Node Provisioning for Solar Powered Wireless Mesh Networks

Solar powered wireless mesh nodes must be provisioned with a solar panel and battery combination that is sufficient to prevent node outage. When such a network is deployed, there are usually restrictions in the way 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 methodologies do not take into account these positional variations, and therefore the deployed system may be over-provisioned. In this paper the resource provisioning problem is considered from this point of view. A linear programming formulation is first developed which gives lower bounds on the node resource provisioning cost assignments. A provisioning algorithm is then introduced that takes positional solar energy variations into consideration. Our results show that a significant reduction in provisioning cost can be obtained using the proposed methodology when compared to the conventional case.