Genetic Algorithm-based Periodic Charging Scheme for Energy Depletion Avoidance in WRSNs

Thanks to the advancements in wireless power transfer technologies, a new paradigm of wireless sensor network (WSNs) called wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) has recently emerged. For a WRSN, designing an efficient charging schedule is a challenging issue due to the inherent constraints of WSNs. Although there have been many efforts to optimize the charging schedule, the existing works suffer from several critical problems. Firstly, they rarely tackle the dead node minimization problem, which is the ultimate objective of wireless charging. Secondly, most of the existing works assume impractical conditions, which include the unlimited battery capacity of the charger, and a fully charging scheme at the sensors. In this paper, aiming at minimizing the number of dead nodes, we propose a novel charging scheme based on the genetic algorithm. Our scheme works when the mobile charger has only limited capacity, and the sensors are charged partially at each charging round. The experiment results show that our proposed algorithm reduces the number of dead nodes significantly compared to other existing studies.