Energy Provisioning in 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. This is normally done using historical solar insolation data for the desired deployment location and based on a temporal bandwidth usage profile (BUP) for each deployed node. Unfortunately, conventional methodologies do not take into account the use of energy-aware routing, and therefore, the deployed system may be overprovisioned and unnecessarily expensive. In this paper, we consider this resource assignment problem with the objective of minimizing the network deployment cost for a given energy source assignment. We first propose a resource-provisioning algorithm based on the use of temporal shortest-path routing and taking into account the node energy flow for the target deployment time period. We then introduce a methodology that incorporates energy-aware routing into the resource-assignment procedure. A genetic algorithm (GA) has been developed for this purpose. Our results show the large cost savings that an energy-aware resource assignment can achieve when compared with that done using the conventional methodology. To evaluate the quality of the resource assignments, we also develop a linear programming formulation that gives a lower bound on the total network resource assignment. Our results show that significant resource savings are possible using the proposed algorithms and the potential resource assignment benefits of energy-aware routing.