A Recharging Mechanism for Improving Data Quality and Maintaining Sustainable Lifetime in WRSNs

The wireless recharging technology of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has received much attention in recent years. In literature, many studies assumed that the sensors are static and aimed to increase the number of recharged sensors and reduce the traveling path of the mobile charger. Since the given WSNs consisted of a large number of sensors that were usually deployed in a wide monitoring region, it is time-consuming for the mobile charger to visit all sensors and recharge them. This article considers the mobile wireless rechargeable sensor networks (MWRSNs) where all sensors are assumed to be mobile, and hence, they can adopt mobility to reduce the overhead of the mobile charger in terms of traveling cost. The proposed recharging mechanism initially determines the number and the locations of recharging stations. Then, the proposed algorithm further exploits the cooperation opportunities between the sensors and the mobile charger to improve recharging efficiency and data quality. In addition, the proposed algorithm further finds the bottleneck location, which has the lowest data quality and then relocates the sensors according to their workloads, aiming to maximize the data quality by breaking the bottleneck. The experimental results reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms the related studies in terms of recharging efficiency and data quality.