Collaborative Charging Scheduling in Wireless Charging Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have the trouble of limited battery power, and wireless charging provides a promising solution to this problem, which is not easily affected by the external environment. In this paper, we study the recharging of sensors in wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) by scheduling two mobile chargers (MCs) to collaboratively charge sensors. We first formulate a novel sensor charging scheduling problem with the objective of maximizing the number of surviving sensors, and further propose a collaborative charging scheduling algorithm (CCSA) for WRSNs. In the scheme, the sensors are divided into important sensors and ordinary sensors. Two MCs can adaptively collaboratively charge the sensors based on the energy limit of MCs and the energy demand of sensors. Finally, we conducted comparative simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the death rate of the sensor. The proposed algorithm provides a solution to the uncertainty of node charging tasks and the collaborative challenges posed by multiple MCs in practical scenarios.