Loss-Aware Efficient Energy Balancing in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Energy management is a challenging issue to be addressed in networks consisting of battery-powered devices. With the recently emerging wireless power transfer technology, many studies have utilized wireless charging to address this problem and provide energy ubiquitously to these devices for making them functional continuously. Besides the well- studied problems such as optimal scheduling of mobile chargers, recently an interesting problem of energy balancing among a population of mobile nodes has been considered to prolong the lifetime of the network through the opportunistic energy exchanges between the nodes. The state-of-the-art solutions target an energy balance among the devices as fast as possible but they waste energy due to the loss during peer-to-peer energy transfer. In this paper, we study the energy balancing problem that aims to minimize both the energy difference between nodes and the energy loss during this process. To this end, we propose three different energy sharing protocols between nodes based on different heuristics. Through simulations, we show that all the proposed algorithms show better performance than the state-of-the-art. The third proposed algorithm achieves the best performance by reaching an energy balance between nodes while keeping the maximum possible energy in the network (i.e., minimum loss).