An energy efficient multi-hop charging scheme with mobile charger for wireless rechargeable sensor network

Abstract

Traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are constrained by limited battery energy that powers the sensor nodes, which impedes the sustainable operation of the whole network. Recent advancements in wireless charging technology provide a promising way to solve this challenge. It uses a mobile charger to traveling through the whole network fields to replenish energy for every sensor nodes to guarantee none of the nodes will run out the energy. But these algorithms only adapt to small-scale network and its’ energy efficiency is very low. In fact, none of these algorithms have considered the multi-hop energy transmission, whose feasibility have been demonstrated recently. In this paper, we proposed an energy efficient mobile multi-hop charging strategies. By introducing optimal central point based polling point selection algorithm, we constructed the best arrest point of each partition for the mobile charger. And in each partition, we adopt multi-hop wireless charging way to replenish energy for these nodes. By jointly optimizing traveling path, relay routing, and charging time, we develop a charging efficiency function to analyze the energy efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our strategies have high charging efficiency.