An Energy-Efficient Wireless Power Transmission-Based Forest Fire Detection System

Abstract

Compared with the traditional techniques of forest fires detection, wireless sensor network (WSN) is a very promising green technology in detecting efficiently the wildfires. However, the power constraint of sensor nodes is one of the main design limitations of WSNs, which leads to limited operation time of nodes and late fire detection. In the past years, wireless power transfer (WPT) technology has been known as a proper solution to prolong the operation time of sensor nodes. In WPT-based mechanisms, wireless mobile chargers (WMC) are utilized to recharge the batteries of sensor nodes wirelessly. Likewise, the energy of WMC is provided using energy-harvesting or energy-scavenging techniques with employing huge, and expensive devices. However, the high price of energy-harvesting devices hinders the use of this technology in large and dense networks, as such networks require multiple WMCs to improve the quality of service to the sensor nodes. To solve this problem, multiple power banks can be employed instead of utilizing WMCs. Furthermore, the long waiting time of critical sensor nodes located outside the charging range of the energy transmitters is another limitation of the previous works. However, the sensor nodes are equipped with radio frequency (RF) technology, which allows them to exchange energy wirelessly. Consequently, critical sensor nodes located outside the charging range of the WMC can easily receive energy from neighboring nodes. Therefore, in this paper, an energy-efficient and cost-effective wireless power transmission (ECWPT) scheme is presented to improve the network lifetime and performance in forest fire detection-based systems. Simulation results exhibit that ECWPT scheme achieves improved network performance in terms of computational time (12.6%); network throughput (60.7%); data delivery ratio (20.9%); and network overhead (35%) as compared to previous related schemes. In conclusion, the proposed scheme significantly improves network energy efficiency for WSN.