mTS: Temporal- and Spatial-Collaborative Charging for Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks with Multiple Vehicles

Benefited from recent breakthrough in wireless power transfer technology, the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be prolonged significantly, generating the concept of wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs). While most recent works have been focusing on WRSNs with a single wireless charging vehicle (WCV), we investigate the issue of multiple WCVs’ on-line collaborative charging schedules in this work. In our design, termed mTS, the network area is divided into subdomains for designated WCVs. Each WCV schedules its charging scheduling path by responding to the interdependency of temporal and spatial correlations from different charging requests. Higher priorities are given to sensor requests with a mixture of closer charging deadlines and closer distances. We further analyze the system performance with an M/M/n/mTS queueing model. Our further study through simulations revealed that our scheme excels in successful charging rate, sensor survival rate, and other related performance metrics. Our field experiments further confirmed these results and showed some further interesting findings on different charging hardware and methods.