Opportunistic wireless charging for mobile social and sensor networks

Even though sensor networks have been used in many applications, the limited capacity of the node batteries is still an obstacle in continuous usage of such networks. Recent advances in wireless energy transfer and rechargeable lithium batteries have opened new ways of solving this problem. In this paper, we study a charging mechanism for mobile social and sensor networks which consist of human-carried mobile devices. We investigate the problem of selecting a subset of nodes which will be responsible for charging the rest of the nodes in the network in such a way that all nodes will be able to continue to operate without any battery depletion. We provide a solution and evaluate its performance through simulations. The results show that the proposed approach can provide a fully operating network without any battery depletion problem if the node relations are similar in different cycles.