On traveling path and related problems for a mobile station in a rechargeable sensor network

Abstract

Wireless power transfer is a promising technology to fundamentally address energy problems in a wireless sensor network. To make such a technology work effectively, a vehicle is needed to carry a charger to travel inside the network. On the other hand, it has been well recognized that a mobile base station offers significant advantages over a fixed one. In this paper, we investigate an interesting problem of co-locating the mobile base station on the wireless charging vehicle. We study an optimization problem that jointly optimizes traveling path, stopping points, charging schedule, and flow routing. Our study is carried out in two steps. First, we study an idealized problem that assumes zero traveling time, and develop a provably near-optimal solution to this idealized problem. In the second step, we show how to develop a practical solution with non-zero traveling time and quantify the performance gap between this solution and the unknown optimal solution to the original problem.