Energy Aware Network Formation in Peer-to-Peer Wireless Power Transfer

This paper addresses wirelessly networked populations of nodes (agents) that can both transmit and receive wireless power among each other, interacting locally in a peer to peer manner. In this setting, we study the important problem of network formation, in particular how the agents can distributively create a star structure. Extending the state of the art, we introduce energy considerations in network formation: in addition to the star construction, our goal is to achieve a certain target energy distribution among the agents. We assume a generalized, more realistic energy loss factor which may differ for each pairwise power exchange. We propose four interaction protocols aiming both to construct the star structure and also converge to the target energy distribution. Our protocols assume different amounts of network knowledge, achieving different efficient trade-offs with performance, measured in terms of how close they get to the targeted energy distribution, as well as their energy efficiency and convergence time.