The energy-harvesting sensor network is a new network architecture to further prolong the lifetime of sensor networks and enhance the quality of IoT services. Due to the inherent problems of energy-harvesting sensor networks, it is really hard to collect fresh and useful sensory data. To solve the above problems, we investigate the data collection scheme in edge-assisted energy-harvesting sensor networks and try to collect fresh and useful sensory data from such networks. Enlightened by the concept of the age of information, we define a new metric, the age of useful information (AoUI), to measure the usefulness and freshness of the sensory data. Furthermore, we define the Minimizing the Maximum Age of Useful Information problem (Min-AoUI) to construct a sensory data collection method to minimize the AoUI of the sensory data. We prove that the Min-AoUI problem is NP-Hard, and approximation algorithms are proposed to solve this problem. The time complexity and the approximation ratio of this algorithm are analyzed. The performance of the algorithm is also verified by extensive experimental results.

能量收集传感器网络是一种新的网络架构，可进一步延长传感器网络的寿命并提高物联网服务的质量。由于能量收集传感器网络固有的问题，收集新鲜有用的传感数据确实很困难。为了解决上述问题，我们研究了边缘辅助能量收集传感器网络中的数据收集方案，并尝试从此类网络中收集新鲜且有用的传感数据。受信息时代概念的启发，我们定义了一个新的指标——有用信息时代（AoUI），来衡量感官数据的有用性和新鲜度。此外，我们定义了最小化有用信息的最大年龄问题（Min-AoUI）来构建感官数据收集方法以最小化感官数据的AoUI。我们证明了 Min-AoUI 问题是 NP-Hard 问题，并提出了近似算法来解决该问题。分析了该算法的时间复杂度和逼近率。该算法的性能也得到了大量实验结果的验证。