Joint Energy Replenishment and Operation Scheduling in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks
Abstract: Wireless charging is a promising way to solve the energy constraint problem in sensor networks. While extensive efforts have been made to improve the performance of charging and communication in wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs), little has bee been n done to address the operation scheduling problem. To fill this void, we propose a joint energy replenishment and scheduling mechanism so as to maximize the network lifetime while making strict sensing guarantees in the WRSN. We first formulate the proble problem m in a general 2-D 2 space and prove its NP-completeness. completeness. We then devise an ff-approximate approximate scheduling mechanism by transforming the classical minimum set cover problem and develop an optimal energy--replenish replenish strategy based on the energy consumption of nodes returned eturned by the scheduling mechanism. Large Large-scale scale simulation results validate our design and show a 39.2% improvement of network lifetime over a baseline method.