An Improved Mobile Charging Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many applications, including intelligent transportation, health care and environmental monitoring. Since the sensors are usually powered by batteries with limited energy, the charging problem of sensor has attracted much attention of scholars. Most of the existing solutions require the mobile recharger to visit each sensor and perform the recharging task, which cause the problems of long charging path and low charging efficiency. This paper proposed an Improved Mobile Charging Algorithm, called IMCA, which recharges the sensor node in the WSNs based on multiple mobile charging vehicles. In such an algorithm, we first construct the energy consumption model of sensor node, then the charging requirement of each sensor is calculated and the charging path is designed based on the constructed model, finally the cooperative charging mechanism of multiple mobile charging vehicles is designed for complex network environment. Experiment results reveal that the proposed IMCA outperforms existing works in terms of charging efficiency, stability as well as the reliability.