Wake-up radio-based data forwarding for green wireless networks

Koutsandria, G.; DiValerio, V.; Spenza, D.; Basagni, S.; Petrioli, C.

doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2020.05.046

Green wireless networks Wake-up radio Energy harvesting Routing Markov decision process Reinforcement learning 1. Introduction With 14.2 billions of connected things in 2019, over 41.6 billions expected by 2025, and a total spending on endpoints and services that will reach well over $1.1 trillion by the end of 2026, the Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to have a transformative impact on the way we live and on the way we work [1–3]. The vision of this ‘‘connected continuum’’ of objects and people, however, comes with a wide variety of challenges, especially for those IoT networks whose devices rely on some forms of depletable energy support. This has prompted research on hardware and software solutions aimed at decreasing the depen- dence of devices from ‘‘pre-packaged’’ energy provision (e.g., batteries), leading to devices capable of harvesting energy from the environment, and to networks – often called green wireless networks – whose lifetime is virtually infinite. Despite the promising advances of energy harvesting technologies, IoT devices are still doomed to run out of energy due to their inherent constraints on resources such as storage, processing and communica- tion, whose energy requirements often exceed what harvesting can provide. The communication circuitry of prevailing radio technology, especially, consumes relevant amount of energy even when in idle state, i.e., even when no transmissions or receptions occur. Even duty cycling, namely, operating with the radio in low energy consumption ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: koutsandria@di.uniroma1.it (G. Koutsandria). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2020.05.046 (sleep) mode for pre-set amounts of time, has been shown to only mildly alleviate the problem of making IoT devices durable [4]. An effective answer to eliminate all possible forms of energy consumption that are not directly related to communication (e.g., idle listening) is provided by ultra low power radio triggering techniques, also known as wake-up radios [5,6]. Wake-up radio-based networks allow devices to remain in sleep mode by turning off their main radio when no communication is taking place. Devices continuously listen for a trigger on their wake-up radio, namely, for a wake-up sequence, to activate their main radio and participate to communication tasks. Therefore, devices wake up and turn their main radio on only when data communication is requested by a neighboring device. Further energy savings can be obtained by restricting the number of neighboring devices that wake up when triggered. This is obtained by allowing devices to wake up only when they receive specific wake-up sequences, which correspond to particular protocol requirements, including distance from the destina- tion, current energy status, residual energy, etc. This form of selective awakenings is called semantic addressing [7]. Use of low-power wake-up radio with semantic addressing has been shown to remarkably reduce the dominating energy costs of communication and idle listening of traditional radio networking [7–12]. This paper contributes to the research on enabling green wireless networks for long lasting IoT applications. Specifically, we introduce a ABSTRACT This paper presents G-WHARP, for Green Wake-up and HARvesting-based energy-Predictive forwarding, a wake-up radio-based forwarding strategy for wireless networks equipped with energy harvesting capabilities (green wireless networks). Following a learning-based approach, G-WHARP blends energy harvesting and wake-up radio technology to maximize energy efficiency and obtain superior network performance. Nodes autonomously decide on their forwarding availability based on a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that takes into account a variety of energy-related aspects, including the currently available energy and that harvestable in the foreseeable future. Solution of the MDP is provided by a computationally light heuristic based on a simple threshold policy, thus obtaining further computational energy savings. The performance of G-WHARP is evaluated via GreenCastalia simulations, where we accurately model wake-up radios, harvestable energy, and the computational power needed to solve the MDP. Key network and system parameters are varied, including the source of harvestable energy, the network density, wake-up radio data rate and data traffic. We also compare the performance of G-WHARP to that of two state-of-the-art data forwarding strategies, namely GreenRoutes and CTP-WUR. Results show that G-WHARP limits energy expenditures while achieving low end-to-end latency and high packet delivery ratio. Particularly, it consumes up to 34% and 59% less energy than CTP-WUR and GreenRoutes, respectively.

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