Cost-Minimum Charger Placement for Wireless Power Transfer

As a promising technology to achieve perpetual operation of battery-powered wireless sensor devices, wireless power transfer has attracted much attention recently. In wireless power transfer, the charger enables the energy to be wirelessly transmitted to the rechargeable sensor devices that are hungry for energy. Previous works mainly focus on maximizing the charging utility or minimizing the charging delay. This paper concerns a more practical issue of placing wireless chargers, which aims at minimizing the deployment cost of chargers while satisfying the overall requirement for charging utility. We investigate the above cost-minimum charger placement problem under two typical scenarios in which omni chargers and directional chargers are used, respectively. To resolve this problem under the two charging models, we first prove its NP-hardness and then propose two approximation algorithms with proven performance guarantees. Finally, we conduct extensive simulation experiments to validate our designs, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform the baselines.