Energy-efficient optical acquisition schemes in wireless sensor networks

Energy-efficiency is an essential feature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where the longevity of autonomous sensor nodes is limited by their battery life and/or energy-harvesting capability. Base-station-initiated optical wireless communication with nodes equipped with a passive optical transmitter in the form of a corner cube retroreflector (CCR) provides sensor acquisition with no energy expenditure on the part of the sensor node itself and is therefore an attractive option for WSN. However, the return signal from an illuminated sensor node is a stochastic variable dependant on fabrication parameters, ambient conditions and receiver noise so that the sensor acquisition process is inherently error-prone. In this paper we propose an energy-aware, base station-initiated interrogation scheme based on exponentially increasing beam scan areas, that takes into consideration the error-prone trait of CCR-outfitted sensor nodes. We analyse the scheme performance subject to different values of signal variance and various cost functions. We extend the analysis to address the circumstance of a spatially-limited sensor-failure event, such as may be caused by deliberate tampering or by environmental factors. We show that agile beam-steering on the basis of accrued knowledge of contaminated sensor distributions promotes energy-conserving acquisition. The validity of a Poisson spatial distribution model for the sensor dispersion is discussed and the impact of this initial assumption on acquisition error is demonstrated.