Error Recovery Using Cooperative ARQ in Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks with Data Allocation

Energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs) have been widely studied as a data collection infrastructure in the context of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). EH-WSNs face the challenge of achieving consistent data collection due to irregularly harvested environmental energy. Energy allocation and data allocation schemes have been proposed to balance energy consumption and data collection across the network; however, conventional error recovery techniques such as Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) do not consider these allocation constraints, potentially leading to unintended energy depletion and data collection imbalance. In this paper, we propose a Cooperative ARQ (C-ARQ) scheme for EH-WSNs that incorporates energy allocation and data allocation. The proposed scheme computes the retransmittable data amount from the extra energy remaining after data allocation and performs retransmissions within that limit to recover errors, thereby preventing energy depletion and increasing the amount of data gathered at the sink node. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves the amount of data gathered at the sink node compared to other schemes, particularly in environments with longer hop paths, higher packet error rates, or more harvested energy.