Prolong Lifetime of Dynamic Sensor Network by an Intelligent Wireless Charging Vehicle

The lifetime of wireless sensor networks are constrained by its limited battery capacity. Therefore, the lifetime is widely regard as a bottleneck of technique of wireless sensor network. Recently, the emerging breakthrough in wireless power transfer technique is expected to eliminate the power constraint bottleneck. In this paper, we propose an intelligent wireless charging vehicle (IWCV) strategy to resolve above problem in a dynamic and scalable approach. The IWCV strategy includes an intelligent routing strategy to traverse the sensor network topology and charging their battery to prolong their lifetime. What makes IWCV different to previous studies is that IWCV can still work even if the topology changes by re-computing the traversing route and stop time for each node in a relative short amount of time, compared with the time needed to find the shortest Hamiltoaian cycle. With the scalable and dynamic feature of IWCV, one can change their sensor network topology without down time to reconfigure the wireless charging vehicle while still maintain low energy consumption during traveling and charging in dynamic network topologies.