Home > Published Issues > 2023 > Volume 18, No. 9, September 2023 >
JCM 2023 Vol.18(9): 571-580
Doi: 10.12720/jcm.18.9.571-580

Multicommodity Flow Reliability for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

John Penaflor and Mohammed Elmorsy*
Department of Computer Science, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada; Email: penaflorj2@mymacewan.ca (J.P.)
*Correspondence: elmorsym@macewan.ca (M.E.)

Manuscript received December 9, 2022; revised May 26, 2023, accepted June 20, 2023.

Abstract—This paper considers energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSN) with multiple sinks supporting concurrent applications. Each application is associated with a set of sensor nodes that generate and send traffic to the associated application sink. Each node can relay any application traffic toward the application sink. In addition, each node uses an energy management unit to control the amount of traffic the node can relay based on its available energy. With the nodes’ energy levels fluctuations, it is essential to quantify the network's ability to fulfill the different applications’ quality of information and service requirements. Therefore, a novel multicommodity flow reliability problem (called MultiFlowRel) is formalized to estimate the likelihood that at least a certain amount of each application traffic is delivered to the associated application sink. The proposed problem is proven to be #P-hard, and an iterative bounding framework is proposed for deriving lower bounds on the exact reliability solutions. The proposed framework compute’s exact reliability solutions if allowed a sufficient number of iterations. Numerical results show the effectiveness of using the proposed solution to obtain good lower reliability bounds and exact solutions in reasonable running times. Furthermore, the results show examples of the use of the proposed framework in solving some interesting network design problems (e.g. optimal sink locations and appropriate transmission parameters).

Keywords—energy harvesting wireless sensor network, network reliability, energy management, multipurpose wireless sensor networks, iterative methods, probabilistic graphical models

Cite: John Penaflor and Mohammed Elmorsy*, “Multicommodity Flow Reliability for Energy
Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks," Journal of Communications vol. 18, no. 9, pp. 571-580, September 2023.


Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.