A Power Balance Aware Wireless Charger Deployment Method for Complete Coverage in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

Traditional sensor nodes are usually battery powered, and the limited battery power constrains the overall lifespan of the sensors. Recently, wireless power transmission technology has been applied in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to transmit wireless power from the chargers to the sensor nodes and solve the limited battery power problem. The combination of wireless sensors and wireless chargers forms a new type of network called wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs). In this research, we focus on how to effectively deploy chargers to maximize the lifespan of a network. In WSNs, the sensor nodes near the sink consume more power than nodes far away from the sink because of frequent data forwarding. This important power unbalanced factor has not been considered, however, in previous charger deployment research. In this research, a power balance aware deployment (PBAD) method is proposed to address the power unbalance in WRSNs and to design the charger deployment with maximum charging efficiency. The proposed deployment method is effectively aware of the existence of the sink node that would cause unbalanced power consumption in WRSNs. The simulation results show that the proposed PBAD algorithm performs better than other deployment methods, and fewer chargers are deployed as a result.