Efficient Wireless Recharging in Sensor Networks

We study the problem of efficient wireless energy recharging in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSN). In such networks a special mobile entity (called the Mobile Charger) traverses the network and wirelessly replenishes the energy of sensor nodes. In contrast to most current approaches, we envision methods that are distributed and adaptive and use limited network information. Also, our methods can be used together with any underlying routing protocol (since they implicitly adapt to it). We propose alternative strategies for efficient recharging, addressing key issues of wireless recharging which we identify, most notably (i) to what extent each sensor should be recharged (ii) what are good trajectories the MC should follow. A simulation evaluation indicates significant performance gains in the network lifetime. Actually, the partial knowledge charging protocol´s performance gets quite close to the performance of the centralized, global knowledge method and perform particularly well in heterogeneous networks.