Velocity Control of a Mobile Charger in a Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Network

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are one of the most rapidly evolving technical areas right now. They can be used in a lot of different applications, environmental monitoring and health applications being two examples. The sensors can be placed in hazardous and remote environments since there is no need for cabling or manual maintenance. One of the biggest problems and constraints of today's WSNs is the limited energy capacity of the sensor nodes. Eventually they will be power-depleted, and the network will be dead. A solution to this can be wireless energy transfer technology which makes it possible to recharge sensor nodes with the help of a mobile charger and prolong the lifetime of networks.  This thesis aims to investigate how the charging completion time can be reduced by considering that the charger can charge while moving and by controlling its velocity. The charging completion time is the time from when the charger starts charging the first node until it returns to that starting point.  For this, a two-dimensional WSN was defined that contains sensor nodes and a mobile charger. Anchor nodes, which the charger travels between were defined by choosing the nodes with most neighbors within a defined charging radius. The traveling salesman problem were used to find a path that the charger travels along. A simulation environment was developed in Python to execute tests.  The results show that the charging while moving approach with controlled velocity could reduce the charging completion time with up to 20%. It was also ascertained that this approach works better in dense networks than in sparse.