Mobile Sink Data Collection Mechanism for Throughput Maximization with RF Energy Harvesting in WSNs

Recent years have witnessed the studies of mobile vehicle scheduling to recharge sensor nodes via wireless energy transfer technologies. However, most of them just overlook radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting methods and few applications are mentioned. This paper presents a novel mobile sink data collection mechanism (MSDCM) for clustered wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where RF energy harvesting technology is put use into recharging cluster head nodes for maximizing the network throughput while prolonging the network lifetime. In this scheme, the mobile sink visits every cluster head in turn. At each cluster head, the mobile sink stops, collects data from the cluster head, then charges the cluster head by RF (in other words, the cluster head harvests energy from the mobile sink). The network throughput is investigated and maximized by optimizing the tradeoff between data collecting time and energy harvesting time in Matlab.